


When the Bough Breaks

by pennflinn



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Barry in a Wheelchair, Between Episodes, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreams and Nightmares, Episode: s02e06 Enter Zoom, Gen, Hurt Barry, Hurt Everyone Really, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, POV Alternating, Team Flash, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-05-28 15:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 23,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6333787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennflinn/pseuds/pennflinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two days after Zoom’s attack which left Barry paralyzed and Team Flash shaken, another meta with the ability harness nightmare energy takes advantage of their vulnerability to exact his revenge. Isolated, trapped, and hunted within STAR, the team is forced to confront their worst fears as they scramble for survival.</p><p>Sticks and stones may break your bones—but dreams will tear you apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long time, no see! Hiatus is over, and I'm so excited to finally be sharing this new multi-chapter fic with you. It's been incredibly fun to write, so I hope you have fun with it as well.
> 
> This fic is inspired/influenced both by a certain Justice League episode (which will become clear soon) and episode 1x07 "Power Outage." It takes place between episodes 2x06 "Enter Zoom" and 2x07 "Gorilla Warfare," so major spoilers through "Enter Zoom."
> 
> Despite the fact that they don't reference the events of this fic on the show (duh), I'm treating it as canon, as it fits in canon during the space between those two episodes. I'm not sure exactly what the timeline is between the two, but I'm guessing a little less than a week, so this is right smack in the middle.
> 
> Alright, I'm done talking for now. I'm stoked! Enjoy!

_One month ago_

"What a nightmare," Cisco groaned, plopping down in a seat near the examination bed. "How are you feeling? Did our mystery meta get the whammy on you?"

Barry jerked away from the light that Caitlin shone in his eye and curled his fingers around the edge of the bed where his legs dangled. "It doesn't matter what I feel. That woman. She's dead."

"It's not your fault," Caitlin said, as usual not accepting the evasions and slapping a monitor onto his chest. "There was nothing you could have done."

"What happened out there?" Cisco asked. "I couldn't get a good lock on the video feed."

Barry took advantage of a moment of respite from Caitlin and ran both of his hands over his face. The images, the feelings, still felt fresh. A long hospital hallway, lights dimming unnaturally, screams that stabbed worse than any knife.

"The meta," he said. "He was standing over a woman in one of the hospital beds. She was screaming like she was being tortured, and I…I tried to stop him, but she started flatlining. The man disappeared while I tried to save her."

"And you felt nauseous and depressed when you were in close proximity to the meta?" Caitlin asked, trying again for a pupil assessment.

"Right," Barry said. "I'm sure he is one. I'm just not sure what his powers are, exactly."

"Luckily enough, I have the perfect solution," said Cisco. He pulled a chocolate bar out of his pocket and handed it to Barry. Barry felt less than hungry, consumed instead by a dread that pinned him in place like an insect on a display board, but he accepted it anyway. "You can thank Rowling for that one."

"We can't let him get away with this," said Caitlin. Barry unwrapped the chocolate bar and she looked at it reproachfully.

"If Doctor Dementor strikes again, we'll find him," Cisco said confidently. "Don't you worry." When Barry didn't respond, Cisco clapped him on the arm. "Hey, you did the best you could. There was nothing you could have done to save that woman."

"That's what I hate." Barry said. "Feeling…powerless."

If he wasn't mistaken, Caitlin's fingers tightened briefly on his arm where she now took his pulse, as if for reassurance.

Cisco, too, softened for a moment, but bounced back like he always did. He pointed at the chocolate bar and gave his best Remus Lupin impression. "Eat. You'll feel better."

Barry turned to Caitlin, raising his eyebrows. She rolled her eyes. "Just eat the chocolate, Barry."

She continued her examination, looking for physical injury that wasn't there—he knew it wasn't there—while he sat and timidly bit off a square of chocolate. Despite Cisco's insistence, it didn't make his stomach bloom with warmth or fill the new hole drilled in his chest. But he kept eating, hoping that eventually it might.

* * *

_Present day_

"Time to eat, Barry. What would you like?"

"I'm not hungry."

It wasn't a lie; Barry couldn't remember what hunger felt like. He kept his eyes fixed on the TV, pointedly ignoring Cisco and Caitlin inching into the room.

"Come on, you have to eat something," Caitlin insisted gently. "You need your strength."

"For what?" Barry snapped. "For wheeling myself around for the rest of my life?"

The comment visibly struck Caitlin, and she averted her eyes as she had been doing for the past two days. Barry noticed it. Noticed her uncertainty, her discomfort. "That's not going to happen."

"Sorry, I didn't mean that," Barry said, swallowing and looking back to the TV. "Melodramatic, I know."

"I think you deserve a little melodrama," Cisco said. "After all, you just had your back broken."

Barry reflexively tightened his fingers over the blankets that covered his unresponsive legs. Since the confrontation with Zoom, Caitlin and Cisco had been so, so careful with him. He felt like a patient on his deathbed, with the two of them hovering, not meeting his gaze, doling out encouraging remarks and condolences instead of the usual banter.

Part of it was his fault, he realized. No amount of inspirational movie marathons or promising medical jargon could take away the fact that he _felt_ different. He felt lesser. Every second of every day, he felt the absence of sensation in his legs like it was death itself. And no matter how he tried, he couldn't force himself to act like it was anything else.

It was a wonder Caitlin and Cisco still bothered to talk to him, for all the company he was.

"I need an answer, Barry," Caitlin said. "Tell me what you want to eat or I'll bring you the Spam from the emergency cabinet."

"Anything is fine," Barry said. "It doesn't matter."

Caitlin and Cisco lingered in the doorway a heartbeat longer, then Caitlin made the first move into the room. "What are you watching?"

There was no point in fumbling for the remote, so he let them take their place beside his bed without a protest. He kept his eyes glued to the makeshift TV screen Cisco had set up and watched again his own broken body being shaken like a ragdoll at Picture News.

"Oh, God, Barry, not this again." Cisco wrenched the remote from the side table and clicked off the TV. "We've talked about this. No watching the news."

"It's been two days," Barry said. "Why won't they stop showing it?"

"Because people are stupid and desperate for sensationalism," Caitlin said. "Iris has been feeding the news the idea that you're already well on your way to recovery; once people believe that, they'll stop showing those horrible images."

"It's not true, though," Barry said. "And it doesn't erase...that." Frustrated, he motioned vaguely at the TV to distract from the heat that had risen up his face.

"No," said Caitlin gently, taking a seat on the edge of his bed. "It doesn't. But it will dull the pain of it. And it doesn't erase the fact that you're strong. Already you're doing so much better."

"Maybe." Barry settled back miserably into his pillows, knowing now it was futile to try and force back the emotion creeping up his throat. Caitlin and Cisco had long since abandoned pretending not to notice.

"How can we help you, Barry?" Caitlin said. "Please, just tell us. You haven't been eating, you've hardly been sleeping…I know this is hard, but we want to help." She looked across at Cisco and he nodded enthusiastically.

Barry had to admire their persistence, their enthusiasm that remained despite the shadows under their eyes. He wasn't blind. He could see how hard they were working to stay positive in the face of their own worries, his moodiness.

"I don't know," he said. "Honestly? I just wish…I wish I had listened. Confronting Zoom like that was stupid, and it's put everybody in danger." He scrubbed at his eyes angrily with the heels of his hands, but the action tweaked his back. All breath was punched out of him, and he froze with hands pressed to his head, as if trying to physically hold in the agony. His wordlessness drew Caitlin and Cisco closer, but he closed his eyes and rode it out as best as he could, ticking the heartbeats before his breath came back. When he came back to his senses, Caitlin was rubbing his shoulder reassuringly.

"Need more pain meds?"

"You know they don't work." Barry sighed. "Jay was right. Zoom is a nightmare I can't wake up from."

"Well, you're not doing yourself any favors by watching your nightmare happen over and over again," Cisco said, plunking down definitively in his swivel chair next to the bed. "Trust me, it was painful enough the first time. Come on, let's watch something else."

He clicked on the TV again. He made a move to switch it away from the news station, but Barry stopped him. "Wait. What's happening?"

Frowning, Cisco turned up the volume a few notches. Instead of the usual, scheduled replay of Zoom's conquest, a new figure dominated the screen. The grainy cellphone image of a man in a long white coat lay beneath a superimposed image of a pale-faced man with dark, intense eyes.

"…labeled as dangerous. While authorities claim the man is unarmed, eyewitnesses say he exhibited metahuman traits."

"Metahuman traits?" Cisco scoffed. "What, like we're all a type?"

"I know him," Barry said, straining forward. "I mean, I recognize him. From that incident a month ago. The…the…dementor guy."

"Shh." Caitlin waved both of them away, fixated on the TV.

"Reports indicate that the culprit is Dr. John Dee, who disappeared from his practice one month ago following the death of his wife. Before his disappearance, Dr. Dee was developing revolutionary technology meant to monitor patients' dreams and cultivate lucid dreaming."

"Revolutionary," Cisco barked. "Yeah. Send your Nobel our way."

"Police are currently searching for the suspect and encourage citizens to engage in caution," the anchor continued. "With the Flash missing, metahumans are considered more dangerous—"

Cisco's reflexes were incredible. The TV was off before Barry could even blink, the anchor silenced mid-sentence.

"You know what this means, right?" Barry said. "This guy is out in the open again. Two days after Zoom. There's gotta be a reason for that."

"You think he's going after you?" Cisco said. "Why? You did nothing to him."

"Yeah, but he's an evil metahuman," Barry said. "When have they ever needed a reason to come after me?" His mouth twitched downward at another spasm of pain.

"Good point," Cisco said with an unsubtle side-eye. "This guy does seem a little loco. He did torture his own wife to death without even touching her."

"We'll go check out this John Dee and figure out what he's about," Caitlin said, jumping up from the bed. "Do a little digging. You…" She looked at Barry sternly. "You get some rest. We'll be back in a little bit with all of the information we find."

"But—"

"Rest." Caitlin set her jaw. "I promise we'll come and fill you in the second we have anything. You are going to be most helpful to us when you are well-rested. Please."

"I'd listen to your doctor," Cisco said when Barry sent him an imploring look. "You know what she can do when she's angry."

His eyes were almost apologetic, but Barry knew now how to see through it. Cisco was still scared. And there was no way he could be faulted for that.

"Fine," he said. "Go. Do your hero thing."

With one more moment of hesitation, Caitlin and Cisco filed out. Caitlin dimmed the lights on the way through the door and shut it quietly.

The TV remote was placed strategically at the edge of the bedside table, just far enough out of reach that Barry would likely pop another vertebrae if he attempted to grab it.

Instead, he resigned himself to staring at the blank ceiling, sleepless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're off! Thanks for reading. If you have a moment, please leave a comment with your thoughts; I adore hearing from you guys.
> 
> Posting schedule will be my normal routine-Sundays and Wednesdays. So, look for the next chapter in a couple days.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, I just want to thank all of you so much for the wonderful response to the first chapter! I honestly appreciate any and all comments, but seeing so many at once was frankly overwhelming. So thank you!
> 
> Just as a general disclaimer that I forgot to mention-as with all of my stories, I make wild guesses about the layout of STAR Labs. I have a very clear picture of where everything is in my mind, and I work off of that map, but it's probably not correct. So if anything seems off, that's why.
> 
> Enjoy chapter 2!

Caitlin lost track of the rhythm of Cisco's finger-tapping after approximately twenty seconds. That was the thing with Cisco: he was always changing rhythms, always staying on edge. It was one of the things she appreciated about him, the part that complemented her and kept her engaged, but now the ever-changing patterns drove a nail through her already-pounding skull.

"Anything?" she prompted sharply. Her own search on Dr. Dee had been relatively fruitless, and the files she had managed to access had been hijacked quickly by Cisco. They were both doing their best to feel useful, she supposed.

Cisco slowed his tapping and his eyebrows flicked upward. "Not much yet. He wasn't exactly a public kind of guy. Give it time."

Caitlin chewed idly on a fingernail, her gaze unfocused. Cisco paused, considering her silence, then raised his eyes from his work.

"What's up?"

"Give it time," she said. "It feels like that's been thrown around a lot here lately."

"Hey." Cisco reached across the desk and rested a hand on her arm. "He'll pull through. I know that. You know that."

"I don't, though." She looked Barry's direction. "Physically, I mean. Injuries that severe…by all accounts, he should've died."

"But you didn't let that happen," Cisco said. "You saved his life. That's saying a lot."

"He's not sleeping," Caitlin continued, the praise slicking off of her shoulders as it had been doing consistently for the past few days. "Look at him. He's exhausted."

"Yeah, he looks terrible," Cisco said. "Like we all do, to be honest." She winced. Her fingernail had been chewed down to the quick. "Go talk to him. I'll keep digging."

"I can't do anything more for him," Caitlin said.

"From my experience, just being around you is a big help," Cisco said with a knowing look. Caitlin sighed, pinched her nose, and relented.

"Come update us if anything changes," Caitlin said.

Cisco went back to his work. "Likewise."

On the way to Barry's recovery room, Caitlin tried to make herself look presentable, despite the obvious fact that fatigue was written into her very soul at this point. She was fooling nobody, but it seemed the proper thing for a doctor to do—a put-together doctor might at least be the façade for a case that had completely broken apart.

Before opening the door, she took a deep breath. She needed the fortitude.

"Barry?" her voice dropped needlessly when she entered the darkened room. He was still awake. Without the harsh white lights that normally dominated the medical ward, she could almost pretend the faded bruises and gaunt features weren't there.

"I need your help," Barry said immediately.

While his voice was still uncharacteristically low, it was more determined, and Caitlin clung to whatever she could get. She perked up, perhaps artificially, and turned up the lights a few clicks. "Of course! That's what I've been trying to say. Whatever you need, I…"

"I want you to help me into the wheelchair," Barry cut her off. She blinked.

"Barry, I don't think—"

"Please," Barry said. "It's been two days since I've woken up. I need to do _something_."

"Two days," Caitlin repeated. "Two days after waking up from a broken back and a stab wound. Most people would say that warrants a few more days of doing nothing."

"Most people don't have accelerated healing and a superhero alter-ego to uphold," Barry said. "I should be able to do this after two days. Okay? So help me do it."

His forehead crinkled, and Caitlin felt herself crumbling under the pressure. It was hard to be the bad guy, she thought, when there were so many other bad guys invisible in the room with them.

"Okay, get those blankets off," she said, and she felt the change in atmosphere immediately. Barry pushed himself upward, his energy contagious, and she pulled the collapsible wheelchair from the wall and unfolded it. "Now, we need to do this slowly."

"Sure," Barry said, head bobbing so intently Caitlin was afraid he might break that as well. "Just…help me move my legs."

He gripped one of them tightly, and Caitlin hesitated once more. "This isn't a good idea."

"Please," Barry said, catching her in one of his famous muscle-melting stares. That was all it took.

"Okay. Just…take it slowly." Caitlin lowered the hospital bed so it was closer in height to the chair and untangled the sheets from Barry's legs. "Here, put your arm around my shoulders and I'll help you over."

Barry did as instructed, suddenly the very picture of obedience. With the other arm he continued his attempts to shift his legs to the edge of the bed. They were still troublingly unresponsive, but Barry had begun to insist that he felt a slight tingling under the skin, like his limbs might be waking up from a deep sleep. She certainly hoped so, because she didn't think she could stand another minute of seeing him lug around the deadweights that used to be his greatest asset.

For a moment, with Barry's hand squeezing so tightly into her shoulder she thought she might bruise, a brief flare of hope told her that getting Barry into the wheelchair might actually be possible. At a glance down at his face, she saw that he was sweating hard and gritting his teeth, but he insisted. "Keep going," he said, sliding inch by inch toward the edge of the hospital bed, his free arm shaking with the effort of keeping himself upright. "Almost there."

However, one more shift and it was over. One of the movements must have jarred his back exactly the wrong way, because in an instant he transformed from stubbornly dogged to rigid and howling in pain. Caitlin unwound herself from his crushing grip and set him back against the pillows as gradually as she could, her heart thudding in overdrive.

Eventually the episode subsided, and Barry, eyes still squeezed shut against the pain, waved idly at her.

"Get me up. Let's try again."

"Absolutely not." Shaken, Caitlin stood and crossed her arms over her chest. "We shouldn't have even attempted that the first time. You're not ready. You need to be patient."

Barry huffed loudly and wiped away some of the sweat from his forehead with a trembling arm, but said nothing.

"I don't know what more I can say." Caitlin was glad for his closed eyes, because her own were beginning to fill. She blinked rapidly to clear them but couldn't keep the emotion out of her voice. "The best chance we have for your body to heal is for you to actually let it. You've made so much progress. Don't throw that away because you feel like you need to prove something to yourself."

"Zoom took everything," Barry interjected, eyebrows knit above his closed eyes as if he was concentrating on a particularly hard science problem. "I hate feeling…powerless. He took that from me."

"Zoom may have taken your legs," Caitlin said. "But he didn't take your power. Not unless you let him."

Barry finally pried open his eyes, sapped as they were of everything that had made Barry the bright and easygoing man Caitlin knew him to be. They met hers, boring into her and emptying her out simultaneously. Then they flicked upward, toward the doorway. Caitlin turned and found Cisco lingering awkwardly there, wringing his hands.

"I, uh…" He averted his eyes from Barry and addressed Caitlin. "I found something. On John Dee."

"What is it?" Caitlin said. "Something that will help us track him down?"

"Not…necessarily," Cisco said. She didn't miss the way his eyes flickered between Barry and her, as if asking for her permission to speak. When she said nothing, he took it as a sign of approval. "But I did find out where he was the night of the particle accelerator explosion."

"Oh?" Caitlin said.

"Remember how the newscast mentioned he was working on revolutionary dream technology?" Cisco said. "Well, I did a little digging, found out that he's been working on it for years. He was working on it one year ago, in fact, the night of the particle accelerator explosion. He was hit by dark matter from the blast and fell into a coma for a month. Sound familiar?"

"So you're saying this dream technology may have been exposed to the dark matter and caught up in the blast?" Caitlin said.

"I'm theorizing," Cisco said. "Based on past experiences, of course. Later Dee was treated by various therapists in the city for persistent bad dreams and insomnia."

"So why did he have it out for his wife?" Barry asked.

"That's the thing I can't quite figure out," Cisco said. "She was admitted to Westbank Hospital for a routine appendectomy when you found her. She and Dee happy, as far as I could tell. Nothing suggests they had any ill will between them."

"Nothing out in the open, you mean."

"Witnesses today reported feeling a heavy sense of dread when Dee passed them, and there were at least two accounts of people actually passing out around him," Cisco continued. "Sounds similar to what you felt in the hospital a month ago, Barry. I'm thinking he has some ability to manipulate people's minds. Alter their mood. Implant thoughts or memories. Something."

"All of this is based on a hunch?" Caitlin asked, raising her eyebrows.

Cisco shrugged. "I'm no stranger to bad dreams, and this guy's hitting all of the right notes for symptoms. Plus, I figure, with our track record of meta origin stories, this guy's powers have to be related somehow to his dream tech."

"Great," Barry said, and Caitlin knew him well enough to anticipate the next question before it came. "So how do we stop him?"

At this, Cisco cleared his throat. "We'll figure it out. I have a few ideas I thought I could run past Caitlin."

"Great," Caitlin said, taking the cues and moving toward the door. "We'll go put our heads together, and you, Barry, take it easy. I'll be back up in a few minutes."

"But—"

"No arguments. Just a few minutes. And I'm bringing you some jell-o when I come back, which I will watch you eat until the last bite." She somehow managed to maintain her sternness in the face of Barry's pouting as she followed Cisco out.

Just before she closed the door she heard a weak cry of "The red kind, please." The door clicked shut behind her.

"So, what's your idea?" she asked once she and Cisco were safely on their way to the elevator. Cisco hopped in and punched the button for the basement level.

"Don't exactly have one," Cisco said. "I mean, I have a few inklings of ideas, but…"

"But you didn't want Barry to know that you were having trouble."

"Dude doesn't need more to worry about," Cisco said. "I was hoping you could help me. If I'm right about him being able to get into people's heads, we need something that can counteract that. I thought maybe we could find something down in storage."

"Why don't we make something?" Caitlin said. The elevator doors opened and Cisco practically power-walked out into one of the large warehouse rooms of the basement. "I'm sure we could come up with—"

"I don't think there's time for that," Cisco said. "Listen, Barry being present at the time of death of this guy's wife doesn't sit right with me. And I don't think it's a coincidence that he's been gone for a month and shows up very publicly and very wrathfully right after Zoom's victory lap with Barry…plus Iris' report of the Flash being alive. You've seen how metas have been coming out of the woodwork after Zoom. They know the Flash is weak."

"You think this guy is coming after Barry to finish him off?" Caitlin said.

Cisco shrugged. "Best case scenario, he's made a reappearance just as a show of force, like the other metas, and the police can take care of him. Worst-case scenario…"

He froze on the spot. A sudden, unprecedented trickle of unease slid down Caitlin's throat and blossomed outward like ice in her stomach. Goosebumps erupted on her arms.

She looked at Cisco, and his eyes were wide.

Then, all at once, the lights in the room sputtered and dimmed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been told often that my stories take a while to get off the ground-but here we are at last!
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, and please leave a comment with your thoughts on the way out. Happy Easter, to those who celebrate, and if not, have a lovely Sunday.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the great response, all! You seriously are the best. It's so refreshing to come home after my class workshops where my stories are torn apart and see people so engaged in my fanfic! So, not for the last time, thank you!
> 
> I hope you're ready, because we've reached the #actionscenes. Enjoy!

"Caitlin, go." Cisco put a hand out toward her, though it appeared that fear was pinning her, too, in place. "I'll find something down here to ward him off. You lock down all of the doors and—"

"You think locking down the doors will stop me?" The voice, rich and warm like hot chocolate, but deep like Zoom's, flooded the basement room. A door slammed shut, and both Cisco and Caitlin jerked toward the sound. "A bit of a security problem you have here. I'm astonished you would let just anyone through these back doors."

John Dee—for that was the only person it could have been—took a long, slow step forward. His once-white lab coat was edged with black dirt, which crept upward like fingers of shadow. Receding brown hair slicked away from his forehead, revealing stony features beneath. If Cisco had thought that Barry's face had looked bad, he was not prepared for Dee's—like Barry, he had adopted an unnatural paleness, but the gauntness of his features extended so far that the skin of his face seemed almost part of his skull.

"Dr. John Dee," Cisco said, trying his best to stay impassive. "What brings you to STAR Labs? Unannounced?"

"I'll admit, I've always wanted the tour." Dee smiled, baring a set of garishly-white teeth.

"We usually prefer a call in advance," Caitlin said. "A text, even."

"I admit, my purpose here is twofold," Dee conceded. "I've been meaning to pay STAR Labs a visit for quite a while now—after all, it's your technology that gifted me a coma and hundreds of migraine-inducing nightmares." All pretense was abandoned, but he kept grinning as he took another languid step toward them. "I might have put that off longer, if not for the distressing news about the Flash. When I learned about his weakened condition, I figured the time was right to pay him a little visit. After all, how better to repay my wife's killer than a hospital visit from a certified doctor?"

"Your wife's killer?" Caitlin interjected, before Cisco had the chance to fire off a more colorful remark. "What are you talking about? You killed her—the Flash tried to save her when you ran away!"

"Delusional," Dee continued, hands splayed out at his sides. "Who was standing above her as she flatlined? Who ran me out of the building as my wife lay dying?"

"Not gonna lie, I don't think your presence was exactly healthy," Cisco said. "You're making me sick already. So why don't you take a step back and reconsider what you did to her?"

"Yes, and, besides, the Flash doesn't even work here," Caitlin said. "I don't know what gave you that idea in the first place."

"You're correct in saying that my presence has an effect on people." Dee's skeletal hand stretched toward them, and more heat fled Cisco's body. "In that hospital I had a delectable taste of the darkest fears of the Flash. Imagine, when I glimpsed the nightmares of Central City's hero and ended up with the nightmares of an ordinary man. There is no way to hide in dreams." A dark laugh burst forth. "It took a month of digging to find out who this man was, a month of refining what I could do with the powers the fates bestowed on me."

"Was it the fates or a particle accelerator explosion?" Cisco said dryly.

"To be frank, I am surprised no one has come to my conclusions sooner, and even more surprised I am the first to finish the job the dark speedster started." His arms opened placatingly. "Wouldn't you agree?"

"You're insane," Cisco said. "Usually Flash villains are at least smart, aren't they?"

But that was the problem. This guy _was_ smart. Even if a bit deluded. Cisco allowed himself another step back.

Dee's smirk faded. "I tire of this. Where is he?"

"Tired? You're the one who insisted on the villain monologue. Talk about cliché," Cisco said, throwing Caitlin a glance. He wasn't sure what he was stalling for, but he sure as hell hoped Caitlin had a plan.

"If you don't give him up readily, I will find him," Dee said.

"He's dead." Caitlin's statement was so direct, so sure, that even Cisco thought he believed her for a moment. "The speedster that dragged him through the city—he killed him."

"Nice try," Dee said. "Where is he?"

"Believe it or not, I am a doctor myself," Caitlin said, drawing herself up. "If you are insulting my authority, I encourage you to reconsider. I watched him die with my own eyes. A broken spine and a stab wound will do that to a person. I couldn't do anything. Surely you understand."

It wasn't a total lie, either—Barry's heart had stopped once on the table and it was only through quick thinking and good luck that they were able to bring him back. The remembrance still chilled Cisco, and the truth and pain of it was still written over Caitlin's face.

Dee, however, didn't flinch. Not even the appeal to the death of his wife swayed him. He stood, unmoving, his eyes now growing as cold as the air around them.

"Save your games for children," he said. "And, I warn you one last time, do not stand in my way."

Caitlin swallowed but never wavered. "You're searching for a dead man."

And just like that, the room darkened further. Dee's fingers glowed dark blue for an instant before the energy burst outward. There was no time to react; the surge of energy rushed toward Caitlin and struck her directly in the forehead.

"Cait!" Cisco moved toward her, but she dropped like a deadweight. He crouched by her side and brushed the hair out of her face. Her eyes remained closed, and a dark bruise already spread above her right eyebrow. Cisco looked back at Dee, mouth already open with a very imaginative set of insults, but he lurched backward when he saw Dee readying another attack. The blast zoomed past his head, and he scrambled to his feet.

"Running to your hero?" Dee taunted. "Think he can save you?" Dark energy surged forward once more. It grazed Cisco in the ribs, and the force of it knocked him back to the ground. Two more rushes came in quick succession. The first punched Cisco in the shoulder, but he had just enough presence of mind to roll over to avoid the second.

Dee's laugh echoed behind him as he struggled to his knees, tripping over himself on his flight to the door. "Nightmare energy: stings, doesn't it? Took me ages to figure out how to solidify it into this state."

 _Stings_ was hardly the word Cisco would've chosen. His side and his shoulder flared with pain and the world spun beneath his unstable feet. The door was so close, and suddenly his survival instincts were the only thing that mattered. He had to get away from Dee and warn Barry—though what Barry could do was anyone's guess, and all he was doing was leading Dee toward his goal, but none of it mattered. Caitlin was already unconscious or worse, and Cisco was the last line of defense before Barry, the only one who could do anything—

"Pathetic," Dee said. "Simply pathetic."

Cisco slipped again, stumbled forward, and just as he did, a final jet of energy hit the back of his head with the force and solidity of a baseball.

He hit the floor hard, smashing face-first into the concrete. The world rang in his ears; its shrillness made his whole vision vibrate and dissipate. Still, he reached out a hand and pulled himself agonizingly forward toward the stairs. He needed to…needed to warn…

Dee said one thing more, but the voice was too distant now to make out. The intention of the words, however, sunk in. _You've failed. He's going to kill Barry._

The thought gave him one last push toward the stairs, but, as much as he tried to cling to consciousness, it slipped away like smoke.

* * *

In his recovery room, Barry dreamed of electricity.

It rippled across his body from points of contact—his throat, his gut—but among the other hurts, he could even feel it. Zoom's hand tightened around Barry's windpipe, his clawed finger dug into soft flesh below Barry's ribs, and he looked as though he'd done this all a million times before. How many other people had died like this, looking into the face of hell itself?

Barry was sucked into those black eyes, those deep, obsidian pits of nothingness, that taunted him, promised him fresh pain, everlasting agony, something more than death, something that lived within that lightning—

He woke with a start and immediately rubbed at his eyes. He was used to his heart pounding this fast, so he didn't bother waiting for it to slow down, merely shifted himself in another attempt to prop his eyelids open. Sleep was bad. Sleep was traitorous.

But he drifted close to it once again, close to that edge where he would trip and be yanked back to reality, time and time again. And as his eyelids fluttered, the lights stuttered once around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, is Dee meeting your expectations on the creepiness scale? Do you want to kill me for my cliffhangers? Any and all comments are appreciated! Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been waiting so long for this chapter. Just a quick note: someone astutely pointed out that Wells is suspiciously absent from this story. I'd actually meant to address that at the beginning. I wanted to focus on the triumvirate for this story (plus I have a hard time writing Wells), so we can just assume Harry is doing his Harry thing somewhere else for the duration of this story.
> 
> Now, enjoy chapter 4! ;)

Cisco awoke with a jolt, shivering from cooled sweat. It took him a few seconds to realize where he was, and when he did, he propped himself up on his elbows and rose slowly to his knees. His head, shoulder, and side throbbed with pain, and the basement still spun dizzyingly around him. He closed his eyes, waited for the pounding in his head to subside enough for him to function, and turned stiffly.

When he opened his eyes again, his gaze immediately alighted on a prone figure ten feet away from where he had fallen. Caitlin. He shuffled on his knees toward her and found her eyes still closed, the bruising above her eye now more prominent than ever. Dread pooled in his stomach as the entire confrontation with Dee filtered back—how long had he been unconscious?

Fingers beginning to tremble, Cisco checked Caitlin's pulse and was relieved to see her chest rising and falling evenly. Just unconscious, then, like him.

"Caitlin," he said, gently shaking her arm. "Hey, wake up."

Her eyelids didn't even flutter. He considered his options—cold water, a slap, smelling salts—but fear, and the realization that Dee was likely already upstairs, lent him urgency. He shook her a bit more vigorously, but when that yielded no signs of waking, he drew away.

"Sorry, Cait," he said. Could unconscious people hear when you spoke to them? Or was that just coma patients? "I'll be back soon."

He stood, swaying, and staggered toward the stairs. All of the lights in the building were still dimmed, which potentially meant that Dee was still in the building. Hopefully that meant that Cisco hadn't been unconscious for too long; if there was any luck on Cisco's side, Dee hadn't made it far into the building. At least, not to the cortex and, subsequently, Barry's recovery room.

Despite the instability of his legs, he took the stairs two at a time. He didn't want to risk the elevator, not when Dee could apparently have an effect on power levels in the building. By the time he reached the main level of the building, his legs burned with exertion, but he propelled himself forward all the same. He rocketed down the hallway to the cortex, the walls blurring from his probable concussion, and willed himself not to pass out.

In what felt like the blink of an eye, he was in the cortex. He hadn't stopped to consider what he would do if Dee was there, waiting, but luckily he didn't have to worry: the place was empty and still. Delirious with a mix of hope and terror, he sprinted toward Barry's recovery room and skidded to a halt when he reached the open door.

Barry's bed was empty, and blood spattered the crumpled sheets and glossy floor.

His heart, thudding wildly only a second earlier, now stopped completely. The punch from Dee's energy didn't hurt as badly as the one that now struck his ribs.

"No no no no no…" Cisco strode into the room and mussed up the sheets like he might find something there. Nothing but white linen and bright red spots that seemed to grow larger by the second.

Full-blown panic mode set in faster than usual, and Cisco could think of nothing to do but run blindly back into the cortex. Dee was gone. Barry was gone. Barry was kidnapped. Dee was going to kill Barry.

He needed Caitlin. He needed someone.

And, just as he reached for his phone to make a call, the computer monitors in the cortex flared to life of their own accord. Cisco leaped backward with a yelp.

"Rise and shine, Central City." Cisco quieted as Dee's face came into sharp focus on each screen. A news broadcast. A _live_ news broadcast. If he didn't know what was coming next, he might have moaned about how cliché all of it was.

But he knew what was coming next.

"I know you've all been _desperately_ wondering about your favorite hero. By now, you must have seen the broadcasts of his defeat, and you are likely concerned about his well-being. Well, I am a certified doctor, and I am here to reassure you that your Flash is very much alive, and in my personal care."

Dee pulled away, and, sure enough, the cold pit of suspicion in Cisco's stomach solidified. In front of the camera now, head down, Barry sat restrained in a metal chair. While the STAR Labs shirt was in plain view—which, on its own, wasn't a good omen for their attempted secrecy—Barry's face was turned strategically downward.

"Don't be shy." Dee sidled back around, coming to a stop behind the chair and planting his hands on Barry's shoulders. "You have a nice face—scientifically speaking, of course." Without warning, he grabbed a fistful of Barry's hair and yanked upward. The face in question was bloodied, one eye swollen shut and the nose clearly broken, but it was recognizable all the same.

"Bartholomew Henry Allen," Dee continued as Barry's hands clenched and unclenched on the arms of the chair. "Or, as his acquaintances know him, Barry. A member of the CSI division of the CCPD. Son of Henry Allen, under the care of one Detective Joseph West of the CCPD." He released Barry's hair and began circling again. "Also currently affiliated with STAR Labs, after the particle accelerator explosion caused him to be struck by lightning and endowed him with superhuman abilities."

He rifled with something just off screen, and Barry stiffened. "Recently, Mr. Allen—the Flash—did something unforgivable. He killed an innocent woman as she lay recovering in her hospital bed." He came back on screen and Cisco saw now what had caught Barry's attention: a syringe, filled with a bright green substance. At once Cisco felt queasy, not just because of his phobia of needles but because of the uncertainty of what sparkled inside of this one. "The title of 'murderer,' however unsavory, might better fit the man you see before you."

In a blink, he was bending over Barry, pushing the needle into his arm with trained precision. The substance had hardly left the syringe before Barry began screaming.

Dee looked directly into the camera this time, a grin tearing across his face. "It's always disappointing meeting your heroes, isn't it?"

Amid Barry's wails, the video feed cut out.

The afterimage burned into Cisco's vision for an indeterminate amount of time, and the weight of the impossibility of it all crushed him. His own probable concussion no longer mattered; numbness circulated through his veins.

Barry's suit was still in its usual storage place, so there was no way to track his position. They still hadn't found a way to neutralize Dee's powers, or even fully understand them. There was no telling whether the drug Dee administered was lethal or simply meant for torture, and even then it was unclear how long Dee wanted to keep Barry alive. And even if they did manage to locate Dee and Barry and pull off a rescue operation, Barry's secret identity was compromised. To the entire city.

Panicked, Cisco pressed the heels of his hands into his forehead. He was a smart guy. There had to be some kind of plan—he could come up with something. There were options. There had to be options. He took a shallow, shaking breath and stumbled backward into a chair. Just as he hit the seat, as if on cue, his phone rang.

"Hello?" he said once he had dug it out of his pocket.

"Cisco?" the voice on the other end of the line crackled. "It's Iris."

"Oh, thank God," Cisco said, running a shaking hand over his mouth. "You saw the video?"

"Video?" Iris said, a frown evident in her voice. In the background, a car horn blared. She was outside, Cisco realized with horror. She hadn't seen the video.

"Of Barry," Cisco said. "Listen, you need to come to STAR."

"Cisco, there's no time for this," Iris said. "I just got off the phone with my dad. He would've called you himself, but he's out on a case and just found out…"

"Found out what?"

"It's your brother, Dante," Iris said. Cisco's heart plummeted. "I'm so sorry. He's…he's in the hospital."

Cisco stood again, mind reeling. "What happened?"

"It was an emergency treatment," Iris said slowly. "The frostbite went too deep."

The fact entered Cisco's brain, but there was so much other information that he couldn't place it anywhere. He paused. "The frostbite? But…but that was months ago."

"Apparently it didn't heal quite right the first time," Iris said. "I don't know all of the details, but…" She paused, and Cisco could picture the way she would close her eyes, swallow once when she would struggle to name something. "I'm sorry, Cisco. He…he lost his hands."

 _Oh, God_. "I—he—" Cisco lowered the phone briefly, willing himself to focus on something, anything, to keep him steady, and failing. "How did you find out?" he said at last. "I mean, how did Joe find out? How did…how does…"

"Cisco, take a breath," Iris said. "Just because you were with him when Snart froze his hands…it doesn't mean anything."

"I'll be there," Cisco said, already blindly searching for a jacket. "Thanks for calling me."

"What video were you talking about?"

But Cisco had already hung up the phone. Sweat beaded above his upper lip, a stark contrast to how chilled he felt on the inside. Iris was wrong, it _did_ mean something that he had been with Dante that day, all of those months ago. It was his fault that Dante—Dante lost his hands—

He bent to a crouch, momentarily unable to support his own weight, close to hyperventilating. How would he ever look Dante in the eyes again? How would he ever look his family in the eyes again? He knew the unspoken statement behind Iris' words: if he had been faster, if he had been smarter, or more present, or better, Dante would have been fine.

He had to go to the hospital. He had to.

But Barry.

He would have to check on Caitlin, he decided, wake her up if she hadn't regained consciousness already. Fill her in on Dee's video message. Get her started on finding Dee while he tried to find a way to prepare himself for his family's abandonment—

Almost drunkenly, Cisco stumbled to the elevator; in his current state he didn't quite trust himself with the stairs. He punched the button and the doors opened instantly. In a blink, he was inside, and in another blink, they had opened again.

He was jogging now, trying to keep balance down the hallway: a hallway that had once been safe, a hallway full of a past reality that was shattering before his very eyes. He wanted to press himself against the white walls, go back to the unresponsive nothingness Dee had blessed him with, but he kept running, passing the room the old Wells had used, passing the room with the cosmic treadmill, passing the main entrance to the pipeline.

It was there that he stopped, backtracked. Stiffened.

"You thought the worst was over. Think again."

At the circular door of the pipeline, twenty feet away from Cisco, stood a dark figure. Blue lightning zigzagged out from his muscular form, and though he was statuesque, he radiated _power_.

Zoom.

At his feet, unmoving, lay Iris, Joe, Kendra. And in his clawed hand, struggling weakly, was Barry.

No time to think. Almost instinctively, Cisco reached sideways and found the tranquilizer gun that was resting near the door. He fired off six rounds in quick succession, forcing himself to focus on Zoom, only Zoom, not the people lying on the ground. The kickback struck his injured shoulder over and over again, but he only lowered the gun once it was empty.

And Zoom simply looked at him, every dart falling from a single fist.

"Nice try."

The words awakened something in Cisco, an old, remembered terror, and he swallowed. His gaze flitted across the motionless forms of his friends on the floor. Pain tore through his chest, and he wondered absurdly if he was going into cardiac arrest. "What do you want with me? What did you do with Dee?"

"I am here to give you a choice," Zoom said, with that slow head tilt that had haunted Cisco's nightmares for days. He was a monster. He _was_ the stuff of nightmares. Something rumbled beneath Cisco's feet. "You or him." He raised Barry higher by the back of his STAR t-shirt. Barry, still bloodied from Dee's attack, legs dangling uselessly.

Zoom's words sank in too slowly, and Cisco shook his head. "I don't know what you mean."

"Your life or his." Perhaps it was the deep reverberation of Zoom's voice or another tremor in the floor that caused Cisco's vision to vibrate. Perhaps it was simply the immediacy of an impossible choice.

"Why?" Cisco said. "Why are you doing this?"

"I do not forget," Zoom said. The image of Zoom falling to the ground from Cisco's dart, days earlier, materialized. "And I do not wait. Choose."

"I…" Paralyzed, Cisco couldn't raise any words from his throat. He shifted his weight, mouth hanging open. Tried to conquer the silence.

And watched Zoom re-break Barry's spine.

His own scream was drowned out by Barry's, and that was drowned out by another deafening boom, this time from above them. The ceiling cracked, sending chunks of cement sailing downward, exploding on impact like dying stars. Unfazed, Zoom flung Barry unceremoniously to the floor. Cisco started reflexively toward his friend, but Zoom bridged the distance between them at the first flinch.

"Your silence saves no one. It never has," Zoom said. "I wonder if you ever tire of being the one to blame."

Although the doorway was open behind Cisco, he couldn't move. He could only watch, horrified, as Zoom hooked his fingers beneath his mask and tore it upward.

Cisco's breath stopped. Eobard Thawne—hiding beneath Harrison Wells' face, but still Thawne—stared back at him.

"You think I died?" he said. "You think you were rid of me? No. I am eternal. I evolve."

More chunks fell from the ceiling, and Cisco's heart threatened to burst from his chest. The world flickered around him, laced with blue sparks of shock, all of it too horrific to be real, because there was no way one person could be so luckless, though that had been proven wrong again and again.

Zoom, the Reverse Flash, or whoever he was, raised a vibrating hand above Cisco's chest. His face, creased with ugly satisfaction, bent closer.

"I am unstoppable, and I will never die," he said, hand now inches from Cisco's chest. "I will destroy you, and then I will destroy everything and everyone you ever love."

But even as he said it, his words blurred, echoed together. Cisco blinked, and the face in front of him flickered as well. Suddenly it was Cisco's own face staring back, eyes alight with the inexorable force of destruction, a warped reflection. A flaw in the system, a glitch in the data.

The building continued its collapse around them, and the Reverse Flash's face sputtered back, and the realization of everything hit Cisco at once.

"This is a dream," he said. His vision cleared again as his own voice came back to him, and for a moment it seemed as if time itself stopped. "This is all a dream."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might have been laughing maniacally while writing this chapter.
> 
> So, when did you guess? I'm very curious!
> 
> Thanks as always for reading, and please leave a comment on your way out!
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your reactions to the last chapter-I had a good laugh reading where you all discovered the dream state.
> 
> However, we're not out of the woods yet; enjoy chapter 5!

Caitlin's eyes flew open, and she blinked in the dimness. The chill of the basement floor seeped into her spine. Everything was eerily quiet. Alarmed, she sat up quickly, but it took another moment to realize why the hush disturbed her so much.

Then she realized: Dee was gone.

She clambered to her feet and took in her surroundings, jogging forward when she saw Cisco lying on the ground a few feet away. A quick examination uncovered a lump the size of a golf ball at the base of his skull—Dee must have knocked him out with his energy powers as he had Caitlin. He didn't respond to her prodding, which was concerning, so she lifted him up by the armpits and half-carried, half-dragged him to the elevator. Unlike Barry, the man was much lighter than he looked, but every step throbbed up into Caitlin's skull.

She supposed she really should've scouted the area first, made sure Dee wasn't around, but anxiousness compelled her to drag Cisco bodily down the halls and into the cortex once the elevator doors opened. The cortex, while still darkened, was thankfully empty. Cisco's sneakers squealed on the pristine floor, disrupting the ominous stillness of the place. Unfazed, Caitlin crossed the length of the cortex and turned into Barry's recovery room.

Alone in the dark room, Barry looked almost peaceful in slumber.

 _Thank God he's finally asleep_ , Caitlin thought, hauling Cisco onto the fold-out bed they'd brought into the room a few days prior.

With Cisco settled, she strode to the cortex computers and booted up the security feeds. She flicked through them one by one, every angle and every crevice of the building, but they were all normal. Whatever Dee wanted, he must have gotten it, or else fled for some reason. Perhaps Cisco, before he'd been knocked out, had found some way to suppress Dee's powers?

Still, to be safe, she searched for a phone to call Joe, Wells, Jay—anyone that might help her track Dee before he came back. Her head pounded relentlessly, and she didn't much like the idea of being alone in the enormity of STAR with two of her friends unconscious and a murderous, vengeful metahuman on the loose.

Before she could reach her phone, however, a shrill beeping picked up in the recovery room. Her head snapped up, and suddenly all she could see was red—a red blaring light from a monitor, and a growing patch of red on Barry's white sheets.

There was no way to quantify the time it took to cross the distance from where she stood to where Barry lay bleeding: it was both no time at all and too long to comprehend. A blink would have been too long.

She tore away the sheets and lifted Barry's shirt to expose the bandages around his middle. They were soaked through already, and more blood slicked down bare skin into the sheets below. Caitlin's heart seized—painfully—and every nerve ending burst with panic.

She didn't even bother with gloves, tearing away at the bandages with no regard for proper sanitization, sterility. The stab wound, the one Zoom had given Barry days ago, lay open and pulsing blood beneath. It looked, impossibly, just as it had the night it had been delivered.

Instinctively, Caitlin took some of the wadded sheet and pressed it firmly to the wound, but her head spun with the improbability of it all; just earlier that day, they'd been preparing to take out the stitches, write off the near-healed wound as the least of their worries. The bandages had only been a precaution, something to keep the stitches undisturbed. Maybe the attempt to get Barry into the wheelchair earlier had torn them, ruptured something…but, no, this wound looked too fresh, too raw.

She must have done something wrong the first time.

She pressed down harder on the wound, and she was rewarded by a choking, sputtering sound. Her head snapped up just in time to see a line of dark blood trickling from the corner of Barry's mouth. Then, before her very eyes, a cut opened just above his cheekbone as if sliced by an invisible razor, and a similar one emerged just below his hairline. Blood oozed from the wounds and streamed from his nose until he looked the very image of the Barry she had pleaded with on the floor of the cortex the night of Zoom's attack.

She pleaded now again, but her own voice was lost in her ears. She murmured the words over and over, _Please, Barry, don't do his, God, Barry, I need you to hold on,_ but there was nothing, nothing but cotton in her mouth and cotton in her ears. Everything had gone so quiet that she was quite convinced that she was dying; the last strains of her heartbeat paralleled that of Barry's as it petered into nothingness.

It was over—she knew it was over—but she couldn't bring herself to lift her hands from Barry's stomach until the blood had stopped throbbing beneath her fingers. The liquid, once hot and sticky with life, was already cold on her fingers. Stunned, she jerked away and lost balance. When she stumbled sideways, trying to run as her friend once had, she left a smear of red on the doorframe.

The room was silent behind her.

She could not summon tears, but the lack of oxygen now in her lungs caused her steps to falter, her vision to blur. When she managed to momentarily right herself, sucking in a huge gulp of air, she found herself face to face with a familiar figure, one who'd appeared there like an apparition. Iris West looked at her, looked at Barry, looked back.

Before Caitlin could force out any kind of explanation, Iris' mouth opened. Her lips moved continuously for a few seconds without sound, and Caitlin realized that it was not Iris who was silent, but herself who had gone deaf. Once she recognized it, she gradually filtered out the ringing in her ears and focused instead on Iris' voice.

The mantra seeped into her consciousness slowly: "What have you done? _What have you done?_ "

"I couldn't do anything," Caitlin said. "I swear, I tried, but there was nothing I could do to save him."

"Is that what you tell yourself?" Iris said, her eyes like Iris' but at the same time so much darker, spectral. "Is that what you told yourself when Ronnie died the first time, the second time? Is that what you told yourself when Eddie died?"

Caitlin couldn't speak. Her jaw was fused in place, her skin buzzing with immovability.

"I thought you were supposed to be able to help people," Iris continued metallically. "Not let them die on your watch."

"I'm sorry," Caitlin breathed. She shrank beneath Iris' gaze, caught between the hatred in front of her and the silent heart monitor behind her. No place to run. No place to hide. Images that Iris had conjured swirled through her mind and flashed on repeat—Eddie's shirt soaked in blood, Ronnie's final burst of flame miles above the city, Barry paralyzed and bleeding out beneath her fingers.

"I'm so sorry," she repeated, and she sprinted. Cutting sideways around Iris, she crossed the length of the cortex to the waiting hallway beyond and kept running into a silence that screamed for her.

* * *

"This is all a dream," Cisco repeated. The Reverse Flash's face flickered; the entire world flickered. The ceiling continued to crumble, but it wasn't quite as terrifying now that he knew the cause.

Scratch that: still terrifying. But more manageable.

"I can still hurt you." The Reverse Flash sneered. "Just because I'm in your head doesn't mean I'm not real."

"Hey," Cisco barked. "Just because you're in my head doesn't mean you get to appropriate my favorite _Harry Potter_ quotes. And, you know what? Because you're in my head, I can hurt you too."

_You're dreaming. This is a lucid dream. Use that to your advantage._

The tranq gun had been empty, but when Cisco lifted it and fired, a darts lodged itself deep in the Reverse Flash's stomach. The man dropped, knocked unconscious with one shot.

"This is my dream now," Cisco said. "My rules."

He supposed the triumphant zinger should have come before his opponent was knocked out, but, then again, Barry had always been better at those things.

 _Barry_ —Cisco looked up across the pipeline toward his friends. Iris, Joe, and Kendra still lay unmoving, maybe lifeless, and Barry struggled weakly on the floor like a dying animal. Cisco paused for a moment, the image threatening to suck him back into this reality.

_Not real, not real, not real._

It was all Cisco could do to turn away. And he did.

One thought drove him: Caitlin hadn't been among the dead and the dying.

All of the pieces started falling into place, and the more he opened his eyes, so to speak, the more he understood. The dim lights, the strange passage of time, the lingering dread—all of it reeked of Dee's signature. They'd discovered that Dee was able to alter moods, and he'd been working on dream technology when he'd been hit by the blast of dark matter.

He could force people into nightmares.

Halfway down the hall toward the stairwell, Cisco broke into a full-tilt run. If he was right in assuming that this was a nightmare brought on by Dee, Caitlin was most certainly in one as well. She'd been hit first, after all, and she had thus far been absent from his own delusion. He suspected he had the advantage of lucid dreaming based on his vibing ability, and his past experience with the lucid dreaming tech, but Caitlin had no such defenses.

He took the stairs two at a time. An invisible clock ticked with each heartbeat. Dream time and reality were certainly different; how much time had he wasted here already while Dee was on the loose in the real world?

The last few stairs practically tripped him, but he raced relentlessly across the floor of the basement to where Caitlin still lay. She hadn't moved an inch from where he'd left her, and the fact startled him back into the reality of the dreamscape. His hand found her wrist, searching for a pulse, fearing the worst…

With a large crack, a chunk of cement from the ceiling shook loose and fell. A split second was all Cisco had to look up, register that it was falling directly toward them, large enough to crush both of them.

A split second was all the time Cisco had to close his eyes, will himself back to lucidity, repeat over and over, _This is a dream, this is a dream, this is a dream_. He hunched over Caitlin's body protectively and threw his cognizance outward.

Another crack, louder than before, deafened and surrounded him as the chunk of cement made contact. When he opened his eyes, the slab was in pieces around them. The pieces formed a perfect circle around him and Caitlin, shattered against the invisible barrier that had momentarily surrounded them.

"My dream, my rules," he panted, and while his fingers were unsteady on Caitlin's wrist, he felt a new surety in his chest.

Caitlin's pulse thumped steadily, slowly. He closed his eyes, focused all of his energy on it. There was no time to hesitate or doubt—there was always the risk of falling back into dream reality permanently, or Dee sending some new terrifying apparition to try to kill him. As the Reverse Flash had said, what was in this dream world was still a danger, and Cisco had watched too many movies to know what would happen if he was killed inside of his own head.

So he prayed, fervently, that this worked. He didn't yet know the extent of his powers or how they functioned, so he latched on to that first experience of lucid dreaming, how it had felt, how it had tasted on his tongue, like cold pennies.

"Thank God I've seen _Inception_ ," Cisco muttered to himself, and he took a deep breath.

Caitlin's pulse thundered under the pad of his thumb. It was thrumming—her heart was thrumming—and the vibrations drew Cisco's own pulse like a magnet to match Caitlin's. Their pulses flowed together as one, in equal rhythm.

And, in between heartbeats, he breathed into her dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter we'll peek back into reality, but the dream world is so much fun to play with! Thanks so much for reading, and, as always, your comments and reactions continually make my days brighter.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm glad y'all are enjoying the dream landscapes. Dipping back into reality for a hot second, because Barry is, in fact, part of this story...but then, I hope you have seen Inception.
> 
> Enjoy!

Barry shifted his torso for the millionth time and breathed out a frustrated sigh. He hadn't been forced to be this still, this confined, for years—certainly, since the accident that gave him powers, sitting still was all but impossible. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. The more exasperated he got, the harder it would be to sleep, he knew. But, then again, the reason for his frustration was that he had been trying to sleep for half an hour. Every time he would drift closer, he would be jerked out of it by a twinge of stiffness in his shoulder blades, or a stab of agony in his spine, or the sensation of being unable to draw in a proper breath. That, or he would be hauled back to wakefulness by the imagined feeling of being dragged through the city at the speed of sound: a feeling akin to that of missing a step in a half-dream.

He didn't particularly want to sleep, not with the nightmares he knew awaited him, but, with the lights of his room turned off and the TV remote too far away to reach, there wasn't much else to do besides sleep. His waking thoughts were almost as bad as the nightmares anyway.

Exhaustion made his eyes water and burn, and he tried again to close them. Focus on his breathing. Use the heart monitor as a comforting rhythm.

Then he felt it. In the fuzziness of that drifting space between wakefulness and sleep, he felt a creeping shift in his chest, just below his heart. It was a dread that rooted, bloomed. The kind of dread that spread through his veins, draining the warmth from every inch of his body.

He recognized it at once.

His eyes, thick with tiredness, flew open. Sure enough, the lights outside of his room in the cortex were flickering, fading.

He was up like a shot. His back protested, but he didn't listen, straining across the bedside table for his phone. He hit his speed dial and held the phone up to his ear, heart monitor shrill beside him.

"Come on, come on…" Barry muttered as the phone rang and rang.

_"_ _Yo, this is Cisco Ramon…"_

Barry hung up before the voicemail could finish. He dialed Caitlin next and put the phone on speaker. As it rang, he frantically pushed the blankets from his legs and began levering himself toward the edge of the bed. One after the other, he gripped his legs and hauled them over. The movement sent a stream of fire up his spine, and he hissed through his teeth.

_"_ _You have reached the voicemail of Caitlin Snow. Please leave a message after the tone."_

Caitlin had never ventured from the pre-recorded voicemail. The beep sounded and Barry wiped a film of sweat from his forehead.

"Caitlin," he panted. "Dee's here—he's in the building. I don't know where you guys are, but…" What was he going to say? _I need help. We're all in danger. I have no idea how to stop him when I can't even get out of bed on my own._ "Call me back. I'm going to…" He scooched closer to the edge of the bed and reached for the wheelchair, trying his best to muffle the wine that escaped his lips. "I'm going to try and get out of here. Get yourself away from STAR. Stay safe."

He let out a shaky breath and ended the call. Desperation was the only thing fueling him to plant his hands on the arms of the wheelchair and lift himself sideways. As it had been with Caitlin, the pain generated by the movement was indescribable, but this time he gritted his teeth and pressed forward.

His arms were shaking too much to support him, so he practically toppled into the chair. For the seconds following he was blinded, incapacitated, and he allowed himself those seconds to ride the waves of agony. However, at the first sign of their ebbing, he righted himself and successfully suppressed the urge to vomit. With less grace than Caitlin might have preferred, he wrenched the IV from his arm and the monitors from his chest, then wheeled dizzyingly toward the door.

He didn't know where he was supposed to run to, but he did know that he had very little time to get there.

* * *

When Cisco blinked open his eyes, it wasn't immediately clear to him where he was. The cold basement no longer chilled his bones, and he was lying on something infinitely softer than cement. The ceiling he was staring at, while thrust in shadow, was clearly white, and an air of sterility permeated the room.

Barry's recovery room. He was lying in the spare hospital bed. At least Caitlin had made an effort to take care of his unconscious form in her dream—instead of leaving his body alone in the basement. He winced guiltily and rose to his elbows. Then, he looked to the side and screamed.

Barry, bloodied and bruised and motionless, lay next to a flatlining monitor.

Once Cisco's own heart had descended from his throat enough for him to draw in breath, he willed himself not to slip into the illusion of the dream. He'd already thrown himself out of the bed on his way toward Barry, but he halted in the middle of the floor.

 _Not real_.

As real and disturbing as this dead Barry looked, he had to remember that he was inhabiting Caitlin's subconscious mind.

Which, the more he thought about it… _disturbing_.

The Barry of Caitlin's nightmare was definitely dead, and it looked as though he had died of the wounds inflicted the night of Zoom's attack. Cisco was no psychologist, but dream psychology wasn't exactly rocket science when you were living and breathing someone's nightmare. All at once staring at Barry's broken form seemed intensely personal, and he tore his eyes away. If they made it out of this alive, he would have to buy Caitlin a beer or two. Or three.

For now, he simply had to find her.

He forced himself to turn away from the— _not real_ —Barry and stumbled out of the room. On his way out, he pointedly ignored the smear of blood on the doorframe.

Where would Caitlin hide, spooked as she was? Cisco's footsteps echoed down the hallway and picked up speed. He hoped she was still at STAR; all of this would be much harder if she'd ventured out into the world beyond. Who knew what her dream reality could become outside the walls of the lab, especially considering what she had done within them. He broke into a jog, swallowing hard.

He was halfway down the hallway when he realized: everything around him was slowly, steadily, losing color. At the same time, he heard something like a wail echo from down the stairwell. The only option was to follow; he did so with renewed fire in his veins, urged forward by the drain of color in his own hands.

The sound led him downward, to the room with the cosmic treadmill. He skidded to a halt outside of the room, noting that the door was ajar. Inside, Caitlin sat on the edge of the treadmill with her face in her hands. The lack of color became more evident in the room—for when he entered, he saw that she had not lost any vibrancy, which highlighted the grayed-out air of the rest of the world.

"Cait," he said, racing to the doorway.

Her head snapped up. Ten feet away from her, the door slammed closed in his face.

He drew his mercifully intact fingers to his chest, breathing heavily. "Cait, listen," he tried again. "Can't you see this is a dream? You don't have _telepathy_. You can't make _doors close on their own._ "

Inside, she simply stared at him, face icy. If she'd heard him through the door, she gave no indication. Cautiously he reached forward and grasped the door handle, pushed the door open, stepped through.

"This isn't real, Cait," he said. "You need to wake up."

"He's dead, Cisco," Caitlin said. The closer Cisco stepped, the clearer the tears on her cheeks became. "All of them are dead. Barry, Eddie, Ronnie…"

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" Cisco said. "This is all happening in your head."

"I couldn't save them," she continued. "Get away from me. I can't help you. I can't keep you from dying."

"Trust me, we're both going to die if we don't make it out of here on time." Hesitantly Cisco took a seat beside her on the edge of the treadmill. She hiccupped; Cisco wanted badly to wrap his arms around her, to comfort her, but he noticed, suddenly, that his hands had gone a shade opaque. Stomach turning, he drew back.

"When Ronnie flew into the singularity," he began again, cautiously, "he did it of his own free will. You loved him because he was a hero—you helped him be a hero. His sacrifice means something. His sacrifice means a lot, actually, as does Eddie's." He swallowed. "Barry being beaten by Zoom was out of both of our control. But you know what? He would have died without you. You did the impossible. You brought him back from the brink of death, and right now, in _actual_ reality, he is alive because of you."

Caitlin met his gaze. The contact spurred him on.

"But right now, in reality, he is in danger. Dee is out for blood, and he's going to kill Barry if we don't make it out of this dream. I can't do that. This is your dream. This is your choice. If we stay in this dream world, if we do nothing, Barry's death _will_ be on our heads. You don't have to be helpless. You can break out of this. Dee can't hurt anyone else if you don't let him."

It was like gears turning before his eyes, great locks and mechanisms clicking in Caitlin's mind. Gradually she stiffened, a puppet being reanimated, and her gaze darkened.

"None of this is real? This is all a dream?"

Cisco's shoulders went slack with relief. "Like I've been saying. Yes."

As if a light switch had flipped, the last remaining color of the world drained. Cisco flinched, but Caitlin simply looked around with new, curious eyes.

"It feels so real," she said.

Cisco looked back at his fingers, which were gradually gaining solidity once more. "Dreams usually do."

The detail of Cisco's insubstantiality did not go unnoticed. Caitlin frowned. "Are you okay?" Then, as an afterthought: "How are you even here?"

"My vibe…powers," he said with an indeterminate wiggle of his fingers. "You know, feeling the vibrations of the universe and all that. And the experience of lucid dreaming in the past. I think I'm technically in a dream within a dream, which makes you Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and me Leonardo DiCaprio. Or…something." At her blank stare, he shrugged. "I think what matters now is less how I got here and more how we get out of here. I have no idea how much time has elapsed in the real world—and Dee is loose in STAR."

He could practically see the memory seeping back into the creases on Caitlin's forehead. "So how do we get back?"

Cisco smiled sheepishly, apologetically. "I was hoping you might have some bright ideas."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! We're about at the halfway point now, so thanks for your continued lovely support. As always, I appreciate your comments, your predictions, your musings.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, you all are wonderful.
> 
> Enjoy!

"Can we _please_ stop running these insane editorials?" Iris moaned. She skimmed the first few lines bolded on her computer screen. "I mean, really? _Dark speedster kills the Flash…with the 'hero' gone, should metahumans be rounded up proactively?._ "

" _People are nuts,"_ came Linda's voice on the end of the line. " _Plus, you can't blame them for panicking. Nobody knows what's going on. People feel unsafe, and that turns them into animals. Irrational animals._ "

"You'd think they would have something better to talk about by now," Iris said, flicking through more articles.

Linda's pause was poignant, sarcastic. " _Seriously?_ "

"Oh, Christ," Iris said. "This one is actually defending Zoom. Saying he's some kind of vigilante."

" _Oh_ hell _no_ ," Linda said. " _I did not get kidnapped by that psychopath just to have people turn him into the next Arrow._ "

Iris issued a long sigh, closing out of the news site and pinching the bridge of her nose. "I just can't believe we're actually entertaining this crap."

" _Haven't they asked you to write anything? You are the Flash girl_."

"Nobody wants the optimistic piece, especially when I don't have any proof. But I'm working on it. Barry needs it as much as the city does."

A beat. " _How is he doing_?"

Iris' jaw tightened. "About as well as you might expect."

" _That bad, huh_?" Linda responded, the laugh in her voice aborted.

"He's healing. He just needs time." An intense pressure was building behind her eyes, and she quickly changed the subject. "What about you? How's Coast City?"

" _Well, it's Coast City_."

Iris' mouth tugged upward at the corner as she mirrored: "That bad, huh?"

On the other end, Linda chuckled. " _Like you said, healing. It takes time._ "

"West."

Iris' head jerked upward. Across the room, the temporary managing editor, Mike, strode toward her.

"Sorry, Linda, I have to go," she said. "Keep me updated."

In the background on Linda's end, a kitchen timer rang. " _Likewise. Stay safe, Iris._ "

"West."

"Yes, Mike?" Iris hurriedly stuffed the phone back in her purse as the man reached her desk. He cut an intimidating figure, hardened rather than frightened by Larkin's death. Iris prayed they found a replacement editor-in-chief soon.

"Unless that's the Flash on your phone, this office is not your personal conversation hour," Mike said. "Take it on your lunch break."

"Yes, sir, I—"

"Do you have a piece ready for me yet?"

"Not yet. I've been working on one, but—"

"A masked man bursts in here like a bat out of hell itself last week, shaking the lifeless body of Central City's hero, and you, the Flash girl, don't have a story yet?"

Iris bristled at _Flash girl_ , but she forced herself to stay calm. "I've been reading over our recent editorials. They're a bit harsh."

"Then write something better." Mike rapped his knuckles against the edge of the desk, making Iris flinch. "Maybe you'd have a story written if you didn't spend all day on your phone."

He walked brusquely away without another word—probably a blessing, considering the words that were forming on Iris' tongue.

Swallowing her rage, she turned back to her computer screen and re-opened the blank word document she'd been staring at for days.

Not quite blank—at the top of the page, centered, were three words. _The Flash Lives._

Over the past few days, she'd fiddled with those three words, obsessed with them. Changing font size. Changing font type. Bolding. Italicizing. Capitalizing.

_The Flash Lives._

She'd straightened up her desk, which had fallen into disarray the night of Zoom's attack. Between the gust of speed and the frantic chaos that had followed, her usually-tidy workspace had gone through hell. It had taken her two days to fully scrub the coffee stains from the white surface and from her chair—while everyone had scrambled excitedly for notebooks and extension cords and keyboards following Zoom's appearance at the station, she had knocked over a coffee cup in her haste to gather her things and sprint from the building. To escape the toxic combination of fear and opportunistic glee that always permeated the station following a tragedy.

In the days following, she'd been meticulous about restoring her work station, ignoring questions about her sudden disappearance that night, relinquishing her own excuses to the mumbled ones provided: _Pretty terrifying face, that speedster had…heard he went off to the police station, your dad was there, wasn't he?_

And for days she'd stared at those three words, memorizing them, trying to force them to be real. Because the more she was forced to think of Barry pale under those white sheets, Barry sobbing into her jacket under the force of exhaustion and hopelessness, Barry without working legs—

The more she scrutinized those three words, the more she felt like putting a question mark at the end of them.

Once again, she closed the document and opened up the news site. Glancing up, she saw Mike at the other end of the room, pasty finger wagging at another unsuspecting reporter. He looked her way, frowned, and made a vague motion that might have been threatening. She ignored it and turned back to her screen, feeling flushed.

Just then, her phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out halfway to read the screen, and saw _Barry_ in bold letters across the front. Peeking quickly at Mike again, who was now too invested in his reprimanding to pay her much attention, she pulled out the phone and held it to her ear.

"Barry. Everything okay?"

Heavy, labored breathing answered. " _Iris. Thank God. Call your dad and tell him that Dee is here._ "

His tone alarmed her, but she kept a steady eye on Mike. "What? What are you talking about?"

" _Listen_." Barry grunted. " _There's a metahuman. John Dee. He's looking for revenge against the Flash and he's currently in STAR Labs. Tell Joe."_

"Slow down," Iris said, because everything was moving too quickly, everything too frantic, too unstable for her. Friends were _not_ supposed to call in the middle of a normal working day to say— "There's a metahuman in STAR looking for revenge? Against you? Where are you?"

" _In STAR,_ " Barry said.

Without another word, Iris stood and grabbed her coat. She was halfway across the room before Barry could say another word.

" _I'm not sure where he is…I'm trying to get to the basement._ "

"Where are Caitlin and Cisco?"

The brisk air outside struck her across the face. She held up a hand for a cab.

" _I…I don't know. They didn't respond…to my calls. They should be here."_

Iris' breath hitched at this, perhaps a reactionary impulse to the drop of anxiety in Barry's voice. A yellow cab pulled up to the curb beside her, and she flung herself into the backseat with a barely-intelligible "STAR Labs."

" _He has some kind of dream powers,"_ Barry continued, panting. " _He can get inside your head—just tell Joe—"_

"Barry, you can't move," Iris said. "You can't even walk, you—"

" _Wheelchair,"_ Barry puffed. " _Look, I'm trying to get downstairs…the headgear we used to fight Grodd's powers. I'm thinking it might also help against Dee. I think Cisco put it in the storage room. Tell Joe where it is, just in case…_

"Don't finish that sentence."

" _Iris."_ He ended abruptly. " _I need to go._ "

She opened her mouth to say more, but the dial tone cut her off. Heart leaping, she tossed down her phone and leaned forward to the cabbie.

"Drive."

* * *

 _Bang_.

"What was that?"

Caitlin turned slowly to Cisco, questioning. Cisco held up his hands in surrender.

"It's your dream. How am I supposed to know?"

They both stood from their position on the treadmill as another bang echoed toward them. Simultaneously, they both rushed toward the sound, out the door of the treadmill room, back into the hallway.

A burst of flame barreled down the hall toward them, illuminating the tight space with orange and red. Cisco shielded his eyes, pushed backward by the heat.

Although he knew the answer in his gut, he still asked: "What was that?"

Caitlin, too, knew the answer, and their suspicions were confirmed by the arrival of a figure at the end of the hallway.

"Remember, this isn't real," Cisco cautioned, but Caitlin had already taken a step forward.

"Ronnie, is that you?"

More fire. Firestorm strode forward determinedly, purposefully. His eyes were devoid of color, just as they were devoid of remorse.

"Ronnie, it's Caitlin."

"That isn't Ronnie, this is dream Ronnie," Cisco urged. "Stay with me, Cait."

A stream of fire erupted toward them, and the realness of it, the shock, snapped Caitlin back to attention. She and Cisco ducked to opposite ends of the hallway in evasion and faced each other.

"What do we do?" Caitlin said.

"We need to be careful," Cisco replied. "I think Dee's nightmares—they may not be real, but I think they're designed to kill. Like they killed his wife. The things in them _can_ hurt us."

"That wasn't the advice I was looking for."

"Remember, we are not bound by reality," Cisco said. "The rules are different here. We're technically lucid dreaming."

"You made it out of your dream," Caitlin said. "Can't you come up with something to stop him?"

"I don't have any control here," Cisco said. "It's not my dream. You have to take control. Use your imagination. You can do _whatever_ you want."

More fire. Cisco shielded his head. Firestorm continued to advance.

"I think you overestimate my creativity," Caitlin shouted.

"Oh, please!"

Fire rushed their direction, and Caitlin shrieked. The air smelled like heat. Caitlin locked eyes desperately with him a moment more. He looked back helplessly.

Then the ghost of a smile bloomed on her face.

A new blast of flame came toward them. However, instead of ducking away, Caitlin stood. Amidst Cisco's panicked shout of warning, she planted herself in the middle of the floor, stretched out her arms, and _pulsed_.

What emerged from her hands could only be described as frost, although it flowed so easily and rapidly that Cisco was hesitant to classify it as solid at all. It connected midair with the flames—the flames froze upon contact, and the frost kept creeping back, and back, following the stream until it connected with Firestorm himself. Instantly the man froze solid, features obscured by a slick blue layer of ice.

Cisco and Caitlin, too, were frozen a moment longer. Then, slowly, Cisco stood.

"Nice one."

"The opposite of heat, best I could come up with." Caitlin shrugged, looking rather dazed. "I'm not sure how long that will hold him."

"As long as you want it to." Cisco patted her on the back, urging her down the hallway. "I've gotta admit, that was a pretty sick power to come up with on the spot."

As they passed the frozen Firestorm, Caitlin lingered, disturbed. "Trust me, it won't happen again. Will he be okay?"

"It's a dream," Cisco reminded her gently. "None of this matters."

They rounded a corner into the warehouse area where they'd been hit by Dee's blasts, and were met with a deep chuckle and Dee's broad smile. "Oh, how wrong you are."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! You know the drill.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Sunday! All of the elements conspired against me to prevent this chapter from being posted-laptop dying, surprise work assigned, beautiful weather outside-but here we are. The length of this chapter also got a bit out of hand, I realized as I was editing it, but I couldn't bear splitting it up.
> 
> Disclaimer: some Questionable Science regarding Cisco's vibing in this chapter. This chapter and the previous one also overlap a bit, meaning that the action of this one starts a little before the action that we ended with in the last. Hopefully it will make sense shortly.
> 
> Enjoy!

Barry was halfway down the hall to the elevator when the chill seized him.

" _I know you're here, Flash_."

His breath froze in his body for a single instant before he pulled himself together. His wheelchair hadn't even reached a standstill when he slammed his hands back on the wheels and began frantically propelling himself forward again. Sweat trickled down his jaw, and ice pricked the back of his neck. He didn't know where Dee was in the building, but the unsettling paranoia of being watched chased him down the hall.

" _Your friends can't help you—I will find you._ "

 _Squeak, squeak, squeak_.

He wasn't sure what was louder: the rubber wheels on the floor, his panting, or his heartbeat. He must have been rolling fast down the hall, but not fast enough. Not fast enough to get away for his pursuer, not fast enough for the Flash. As the Flash, he may has well have been crawling for how sluggish he felt.

The approaching dread weighed down his arms and his resolve, numbing him from the inside out. A jolt of foreign fear signaled to him that Dee was close; he was never going to make it to the elevator.

Halfway there, he made split-second decision and jerked toward the stairwell door.

No need for discreetness anymore. The heavy door banged open, and Barry launched himself through it. Then he was tilting down, clutching the arms of his chair for dear life. The wheels kept to the stairs for the first flight, and halfway down the second. Each bump, each stair, sent white-hot pain up his spine, but he clung to the chair's solidity—even when, at that halfway point down the second flight, it bounced a little too far from the stair and began tumbling freely.

_Bam. Bam. Bam._

Barry wasn't entirely sure when the free fall began and when, exactly, it ended. Even when the consciousness came to him that he was lying on the floor of the landing, his body couldn't process the abrupt halt from tumbling. The solid walls and floor spun wildly around him, and an ache pulsed through him steadily, as if he were still hitting every step.

Thoroughly dazed, he lifted his head and tried to take stock of his surroundings. First, his legs: he still couldn't feel them, which was probably a blessing given the way they had twisted about each other in the fall. He had landed on his stomach, likely another blessing given the state of his back, and his chin throbbed from the impact of either a stair or the landing. It took him a moment longer to realize that his nose was dripping blood, though the pain of it was drowned out by the accumulation of dozens of other pains in his body. The wheelchair itself lay overturned a foot away, wheels still spinning. Farther away still, his phone lay with a newly-cracked screen.

" _Oh Mr. Allen…"_

The voice, now wafting down the stairwell, was enough to spur him into action again. Never mind the fact that Dee somehow knew his name, knew his _identity_ —none of that would matter if he was caught.

Twenty feet from the stairwell was the treadmill room. It had a door. A door that could be locked.

Too desperate and determined now for his hands to shake, Barry began pulling himself toward the door. There was no way he would be able to right the wheelchair and drag himself into it in a reasonable amount of time. So he crawled, one hand in front of the other.

A coppery taste hit his tongue.

" _I feel your fear,_ Flash…"

His arms sang with the effort of pulling his deadweight body along the floor, and his breath came in sharp gasps, but he couldn't, _couldn't_ , stop. Ten feet more, five feet, one foot…

Once his legs were clear of the doorway, he reached upward for the doorknob. The first stretch triggered an eruption of pain in his spine and fell back with a moan. However, the instant the crest of hurt began to fall, he forced himself up again, this time pulling the door blindly closed and turning the lock. Why there was a lock on the treadmill room door, Barry couldn't be sure—but he wasn't going to question it now.

He sank back to the floor and reveled in a brief moment of sweat-soaked victory before pulling himself toward the treadmill itself. He had the sense that there was no point in hiding, as even behind the closed door he could feel the creeping unease that Dee generated, but the locked door would hopefully slow the other meta down. And there might be something useful in the room that Barry could use to defend himself. Hope of reaching the Grodd headgear had vanished—he would have to improvise, and hope that someone would come to help soon. If there was anyone left.

And suddenly, dragging himself across the floor, he was struck by a distinct sense of déjà vu, hollowed out by current desperation: him and Caitlin cowering in this same room, de-powered and helpless as Farooq loomed over them. Him and Caitlin and Cisco sitting together at the edge of the treadmill, safe together, always together, stronger…

His palm smacked against the running board. His nails scraped against the tread. His arms, trembling, nearly buckled with the pressure of dragging himself upward. Here, now, he was alone. And if he wanted to survive, he couldn't think about Caitlin and Cisco. Couldn't think of what Dee had done to them.

So he crawled, pushing the memories aside.

"I can't say I'm not impressed."

The voice was no longer ethereal, no longer disembodied; it belonged now to Dee himself, his physical form, standing behind the window that separated the room from the hallway. Pale and gaunt, shrouded in a dirtied lab coat, he might have been a ghost.

"Well, impressed and disappointed at once," he continued, and Barry began searching the area wildly for something with which to defend himself. Boxes of packing peanuts, heavy power cords, a few tall, blue canisters. Nothing, in short, that might help him in this situation.

"Impressed at your stubborn determination." Dee knocked on the glass as if to emphasize his point. "Making it from one floor to another and locking yourself up without working legs? Truly remarkable." His hand lowered. "Disappointed, however, by how much more _fun_ this could have been. Look at you, the _Flash_ , lying helpless on the floor. It's almost too easy."

"Yeah, I've been disappointing a lot of people lately," Barry grunted, heaving himself forward. "One more won't hurt." Another grunt. "And you're not exactly original, wanting to kill me. Coming here to try and kill me."

"What do I care about originality? This isn't about flair, or fame, or power. This is simply about enacting justice." Dee narrowed his eyes. "A justice you are exempt from. A justice that slips you by and allows you to walk free from murder."

At this, Barry paused. "Murder?"

"My wife," Dee said. "Or don't you remember? Do these things _bleed_ together in your mind after so much repetition? Have you become so de-sensitized to it that you feel nothing? Or is it the opposite? Do you feel joy in making people suffer?"

"I didn't kill your wife," Barry said. "You did. You were torturing her." The memory sank in, and the truth clicked. "Intentionally, or not. But we can help you here." He paused, gulping. "Don't do this."

"It's too late, Mr. Allen," Dee said. "It's over. Now, would you prefer a slow death, or a quick one?"

He took a step back from the window and raised a hand, as if preparing for something.

Then he cocked his head. "Oh, what do I care what you prefer? A doctor does know best." His fingers pulsed.

All at once, the anxiety that had been pooling in Barry's stomach rose up in his throat, choking him, acidic. Fear like knives stabbed into his temples, through his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut against it, all of his attention sucked into maintaining consciousness. Blue lightning began flickering behind his eyelids, growing white-hot with intensity.

He was dying, surely, smothered by his own panic. Everything was fading, everything except the lightning, and he couldn't tell if he was yelling or crying or dying but everything was dark and heavy and loud and pressure squeezed him from all sides—

Then, all at once, everything silenced.

Panting hard, Barry wrenched his eyes open and re-focused on Dee. Behind the glass, the man still had his hand up, his lips stretched wide, but these things were frozen in place—Dee petrified as if stuck in carbonite. Barry stared for a few seconds, watching, waiting, but the doctor didn't move. It didn't even look like he was breathing. His eyes were glazed, staring at a point in empty space.

What was happening, and how long it would _keep_ happening, was impossible to tell, but Barry wasn't going to question it. He tore his eyes away from the statuesque villain and began his search of the room in earnest, whole body throbbing with tension.

* * *

"Oh, how wrong you are."

"Dee," Caitlin said, unconsciously reaching for Cisco's sleeve. "It's over. We know we're in a dream. My dream."

"Congratulations," Dee said in a drawling voice. "You're mildly smarter than I guessed. But your intelligence doesn't get you out of the woods."

"What is this, then?" Cisco said. "Are you, like, the final boss of this video game? We make it through all of the minions and win the game once we take you down?"

It certainly looked like it—Caitlin would give Cisco that. With the remnants of Ronnie's flames curling up the edges of the room, bathing it in flickering orange, the place looked fit for a battleground. The Dee of the dream was far removed from the Dee of the real world. The skin of his face was melted cleanly away, leaving a glistening white skull with yellowed eyes in the shadows of the eye sockets. His lab coat now was completely covered in gray, a deep gray that seemed to swirl like smoke in the insubstantial light of the basement.

"That is your downfall," he said. "You assume that this is all a game, when, in fact, I can still very much hurt you."

He extended a hand and a burst of dark energy sped toward them, similar to that which had struck them in the real world. Desperate, Caitlin shoved Cisco sideways, and the blast tore through her sleeve. A cry wrenched itself from her throat and she dropped to her knees, clutching the arm that now burned as if gouged by Firestorm's flame.

"If you were going to kill us yourself in our dreams, why not do it earlier?" Cisco said bitterly, his hand finding Caitlin's shoulder. She breathed heavily, fixated by the smoking, red flesh visible beneath her torn sleeve.

"I admit, I didn't think I would have to interfere personally," Dee explained. "I hardly thought you would make it past my _minions_ , or even come to the realization that you were in a dream. I had business to attend to in the real world before you two forced me to come here."

"You can only exist in one plane at a time," Caitlin said, realization seeping through the cracks left by fresh pain. "Your consciousness can only be present in the real world or the dream world, not both at once. Fascinating."

" _Fascinating_ , I'm sure," Dee mocked. He locked his skeletal fingers together as if in contemplation. "And you, I'm afraid, have interrupted a rather important engagement in the real world that I must return to. I'll make your deaths quick."

"What, you have too many other family members to torture to death in the real world?" Cisco spat. His forwardness surprised Caitlin, but, then, there were a lot of things in the subconscious world that were surprising.

"Oh, no, not mine," Dee said. "But perhaps yours. The idea of a chosen family sounds so nice on paper—and I gather from Mr. Allen that you three have sealed the contract in ink."

Ripping free of Cisco's grip, Caitlin rose firmly to her feet. "Don't you dare touch him."

"Too late, dear." Dee sneered. "The hunt is already on—and it's one I must return to."

Next to Caitlin, Cisco stood, and they exchanged a look. The longer they kept Dee occupied, the more time they bought for Barry in the real world.

"Why don't you stay here and face us like a real villain?" Cisco said. "Or are we too scary for you?"

Dee, however, regarded them as if they were insects to be crushed, mere distractions, and Caitlin's arm throbbed as a reminder. Dee looked them both in the eye, nodded slowly.

"I know both of you better than you think, and I know your connection to the Flash," he said. "And I know that I can hurt you far worse in reality than I can here, without even touching you. I know you both have one nightmare in common—let me see what I can do to fulfill it."

His face, his solidity, began to fade, dissolving slowly in the light of the flames. Cisco reacted first, perhaps on instinct, lunging forward toward the doctor, forcing his attention sideways. Dee retaliated with an energy blast that Cisco narrowly avoided, but the distraction worked: Dee's solidity returned, if only momentarily.

"We can't let him leave the dream world!" Cisco shouted in Caitlin's direction. She was already looking around the space, searching for a weapon, something to help. Cisco yelped and an energy blast crashed into a set of boxes at the wall. "If he leaves here, he's back in the real world with Barry."

"And how—" Her question was cut off by another sizzling stream of dark energy launched her way.

"Your dream, remember!" Cisco shouted. "Make something!"

Cisco dove to the side, grabbed a discarded wrench from the floor, and flung it at a fast-disappearing Dee. Dee stopped the airborne wrench with a single hand, crushing it into dust with his fist. The image struck a memory in Caitlin, and she knew, at once, what to do.

"Come on, come on, come on…" she muttered to herself, holding her palms open in front of her. The adrenaline and fear and pain clouded her mind, but she stubbornly carved a path through it all. This was her dream, this was her mind, and she was the one who could take control of it and create—

A tranq gun. Out of thin air. It materialized in her hands and she lifted it on instinct. No time to marvel at the impossibility of it all. The first shot went wide, zinging into a wall at the far end of the room, but the second hit its target precisely. The dart caught Dee in the throat, piercing the bone that he now appeared to be made of, and he halted in his tracks, one second away from blasting a fallen Cisco.

"Since you seem so fascinated with sleep," Caitlin panted, lowering the gun, "why don't you give your own medicine a try?"

"Fools." To Caitlin's horror, Dee gripped the dart by the base and wrenched it from his neck, tossing it aside like a piece of trash. "You think you have power here. But _I_ created this. You can't kill me. And you have distracted me long enough."

Even if she hadn't been paralyzed by shock, there wouldn't have been nearly enough time for Caitlin to react. Dee, perhaps fueled by anger—or, worse, the tranq dart itself—was gone in a blink, dissipated like smoke.

"He's…he's…"

"In the real world again," Cisco said, pulling himself off of the floor with a wince. "Back to hunting Barry. We need to get out of here. Fast."

The word _hunting_ made Caitlin feel feverish, though she supposed it might have also been the heat from the flames surrounding them. The space that Dee had once occupied loomed, hauntingly empty, and it was another second before Caitlin could wrench her eyes away.

"How?"

"Well, Dee got me thinking, about existing in one plane or another, about him creating this reality." Cisco spoke looking at the floor as he usually did when thinking through a problem verbally. It was such a familiar, concrete, constant thing that a spark of hope flared in Caitlin's chest. "And my vibing is kind of like that—moving between realities—and I figure, if I can pass from one dream to the next, maybe I can feel out the vibrations of this room, connect to this room in reality—"

"Vibe both of us out of here?" Caitlin said. "Is that even possible? You barely made it out when you went into the lucid dream the other month."

"But I didn't know about my powers then," Cisco insisted, "and this time I know we're in a dream. We both do. But we need to move before we start to forget again."

In Caitlin's arms, the tranq gun de-materialized. Cisco gave it a skeptical glance before reaching forward and taking her hands in his.

"So how does this work?" Caitlin asked.

Cisco met her gaze and tried a smile, squeezing his fingers in her palms. "I'm not entirely sure. But I think you'll know when I do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm loving your comments, and I especially love reading about your typical dream characteristics. Such a fun topic.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The hiatus is over! Let's celebrate with more angsty fic.
> 
> I got a few comments about the cheesy one-liners in the last chapter; I hope you like them, because there's a lot more where that came from.
> 
> Enjoy!

Although the STAR parking lot was filled as usual by Caitlin and Cisco's cars, plus two STAR Labs vans, everything felt unusually lonely and quiet. Perhaps it was due to the fact that all of the exterior lights were dimmed in the dusky evening—but Iris found herself swallowing a lump of unease. For the first time, as she pulled into the parking lot, she wondered if she should have called her dad or Dr. Wells or Jay.

She did still have time—but, ironically, time was also the last thing she had. Her phone stayed in her pocket, and her heart stayed in her throat.

Iris figured the safest and quickest place to enter was through one of the back entrances, which would take her straight to the basement. She slipped out of her car and into one of the alleyways, preferring stealth even though she was still outside. She pulled out the key card Cisco had given her a few months back, but there was no need; the door was already open.

Obviously, that did nothing to ease her anxiety.

Still, she pushed ahead into the building, into the waiting darkness.

Being a part of the team for such a short amount of time hadn't given her full knowledge of the workings of the building, but she had at least a vague idea of where the storage room was. All of the lights in her path were dimmed, giving her the disturbing impression that she was following the exact route that Dee had taken when he'd entered the facility. It was also eerily quiet, and Iris felt the need to hold her breath as she made her way down the hall.

Please be okay, Barry…please be okay…

However, when she turned into the doorway that would bring here to the storage area, she realized that it wasn't just Barry that she needed to be worrying about.

"Cait! Cisco!"

They couldn't hear her, of course; both of them lay on the ground, motionless. Cisco was closest to her, facedown on the floor, so she ran to his side and rolled him to his back. There was not a mark on him, but he didn't respond to her shaking.

She tried Caitlin next; unlike Cisco, she had a large bruise above her eyebrow indicating signs of a struggle. She, too, remained unresponsive to Iris' prodding.

"Come on, Cait, I need you," she said. "Wake up, please."

Caitlin didn't even twitch.

Fortunately, the two of them were breathing. Unfortunately, Barry was not beside them, meaning he was still somewhere else in the facility with Dee. Though she was reluctant to leave the comatose scientists, she forced herself upright and continued to the storage facility.

Though she hadn't been on the team for very long, her first mission had been the Grodd mission, after all—she knew right where to look. Head buzzing with the combined anxieties of time sensitivity and seeing her friends unconscious, Iris strode through the aisles of items. Cisco was notorious for storing each new prototype of every project he developed, so the storage facility was far more crowded than it had been during the Grodd fiasco. Wands, gloves, insignias—everything imaginable was piled onto the shelves and labeled. Feats of technology, Iris was sure; she passed each one with indifference.

Finally, she reached what she was looking for: the headband. It was surrounded by other hunks of metal and glass, looking surprisingly innocuous on the shelf. There was a brief moment where Iris wondered if the headband even still worked, or if it had been placed down here because of a malfunction. After all, there was no indication that Grodd would ever be back, negating the need for repairs. But she couldn't entertain that thought. Malfunctioning or not, she needed to trust Barry's judgment and at least try it.

With the headband firmly in place, she took off toward the door in search of Barry. She didn't dare try calling him, for fear of giving him away if he was hiding, but he couldn't have gotten far in his wheelchair.

Of all the times to invade STAR…

The trail of dim lights branched off in multiple directions once she was out of the storage area. She chose one arbitrarily and followed the darkness. The walls curved around her, casting unnerving shadows before her.

Come on, West. Strength. You've got this. You're Barry's last hope. You're STAR's last hope.

Man. She really wished she'd brought backup.

She continued jogging down the hall for what felt like hours, all attention sharpened immensely, but she skidded to a halt when her sprinting led her to a statuesque figure.

She'd never seen Dee before, but she'd seen enough supervillains to recognize one. Even from a distance, his shadowy get-up, his skeletal form, were evident. She paused in the middle of the hallway, frozen temporarily by fear, perplexed also by his stillness.

Then, just as she resolved to move toward him, he unfroze. His hand, which had been raised in a stop motion, slowly lowered, and he took a step toward the glass window separating him from—

"Well, Mr. Allen, it looks like your friends are going to remain stuck in the dream world for a long while yet—if they thought they could save you, they were sorely mistaken."

The treadmill room. Barry was trapped in The treadmill room. And Caitlin and Cisco: the reason they didn't respond was because they were stuck dreaming.

Iris knew, instantly, instinctually, what she had to do.

"I think you're the one who's mistaken," she said. "They're not his only friends."

Dee pivoted, faced her. Every nerve ending in Iris' body told her to run, but under his piercing gaze she forced herself to stay planted.

"Another one of the Flash's sidekicks?" Dee said.

"Far from it," Iris said, thinking back involuntarily to her conversation with Linda just days ago, before the world went to hell—CrossFit, sure—and wondering if the Flash would ever need a sidekick again. "I'm your worst nightmare."

This elicited a full-bellied laugh from Dee, who began taking easy strides toward her. "Amusing. I appreciate good humor. It's a sign of intelligence." He lifted a hand again, this time toward her. "Now, let's see what else is in that pretty brain of yours."

She held her ground. It was now or never. Either the headband would work or it wouldn't. Either she would stop Dee here and now, or he would be free to murder Barry unhindered.

Dee continued his approach, halfway down the hall toward her now, and Iris heard a voice filter from the treadmill room faintly.

"Iris? Iris, get out of here!"

Barry.

Five feet from her, Dee paused, his fingers curling.

"Isn't this interesting?" He cocked his head. "There is something blocking my access into your mind."

"Yeah, fascinating," Iris deadpanned. "Funny what a little piece of tech can do to a supervillain. Drops them like flies."

"The headband?"

Iris nodded, swallowing thickly. "See what I mean? One little piece of metal to stop you. Without your powers, what are you? You're just a pathetic old man chasing dreams."

"Oh, you're mistaken on that count," Dee said. "A mind might be compromised, but a man can still do damage."

Out of his hand came a stream of dark energy, which Iris barely evaded by diving forward.

So it was going to be a fight. CrossFit. Sure.

Her momentum carried her toward Dee, and she used it to throw her fist into his face. It connected. He was slow, then, here in the real world. Slow, but strong. The punch glanced off of his cheek, throwing his face sideways but not nearly as effective as the blow might have been on normal people. It was as if she was punching bone.

Still, she tried again, this time aiming for his throat. He deflected, swiping sideways and grabbing her wrist.

"Nice try," he said.

"Yeah, you like that?" Using her free hand, she grabbed his shoulder, pulled down him down, and jerked her knee upward simultaneously. He released her instantly, grunting with pain, and she drew back to the wall. The wrist that he had been holding burned with cold fire, and she choked back a sudden wave of dread.

Dee rushed her, and she yanked a fire extinguisher from the wall. Just as she felt his breath on her neck, she swung the extinguisher around. It rang with the impact of striking his cheekbone. More than the punch, this blow spun him around into the opposite wall.

However, she didn't stop. When his back was turned, she swung the extinguisher again and caught him across the back. He crumpled to the ground, his lab coat billowing around him. Iris sucked in a shaky breath, pausing just long enough to ready herself for another attack.

With her arms and the extinguisher raised, she had no way to defend herself from Dee's blast. This time it wasn't a focused stream, but a wave of energy that pulsed outward from Dee's core. The wave struck her around the middle and forced her backward. Her back hit the wall, knocking the wind from her body, and she sank.

The extinguisher clanged to the floor beside her, and Dee was on it in a second. He picked it up with one hand and swung. Dizzy, Iris held up a hand to attempt to stop the swing, but the extinguisher caught her in the upper arm and followed through with a sickening crack. She screamed as pain erupted down her arm. Dee coiled back and readied another strike, but, nearly blinded by pain, Iris kicked outward and caught his ankle.

He tumbled to the floor beside her, and she scrambled backward as much as she could on one arm. Desperate, she kicked out at his head, but she was too fuzzy from pain to aim correctly. Her foot glanced off of his shoulder and he clamped down on her ankle. Fear spread like ice through her body, and she jerked like a caged animal.

"You may have that fancy headgear, but I can still make you feel pain, and terror, and self-hate," Dee said.

Iris wrenched her ankle away. "You can't make me feel any of that. You can't get inside my head."

"I don't need to get inside your head to realize your worst nightmares." Dee reached up, grabbed her injured arm, twisted. Iris yelped, but her attempt to get away was stopped by a blast of glowing dark blue energy that twisted around her wrists and snaked around the hook in the wall where the fire extinguisher had once hung. The strain of her arms being pulled upward sent lava through her body, but the rope of energy held firm as steel chains.

Wincing, Dee stood. "Reality can be so much worse than dreams," he said. "Have fun listening while I tear your pathetic little boyfriend apart."

"No," Iris said, tugging her bonds, crying out at the pressure. "No, wait, stop!"

Dee stopped a few limping steps down the hall and faced her. In addition to the obvious limp, a long, red cut had opened up down the side of his face from the first hit of the fire extinguisher. All humor was gone from his face, and bloodied and beaten he looked even more threatening than before.

"Stop, please," Iris said. "You don't have to do this. We're not the enemy here. Far from it."

However, Dee just regarded her, silent in the dark hallway, before turning back and striding to the room where Barry lay waiting. She might have bought her friend some time—but that time was up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I got upset at the episode last night when it ended on a cliffhanger-and then I realized that I probably deserved it.
> 
> As always, please consider leaving a comment with your thoughts. I love them.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	10. Chapter 10

Barry heard Iris' scream from outside the room, and for the hundredth time he attempted to raise himself to his feet. And, for the hundredth time, he made it halfway to his knees before collapsing with a cry.

"Stop, please," he heard Iris shout from the hallway. "You don't have to do this. We're not the enemy here. Far from it."

"Iris," Barry whispered, grunting as he propped himself up by the elbows. "Iris, no…"

A disturbing silence followed Iris' scream from the hallway, then slow, deliberate footsteps. Panicking now, Barry braced himself against the edge of the treadmill and faced the door.

To his horror, it wasn't Iris who strode into frame behind the window, but a bruised and bloodied Dee. Barry swallowed, eyeing the still-locked door, expecting a monologue, a break-in attempt, something—but Dee said nothing.

He merely held up a hand as before, lit up the window with blue energy, and walked straight through into the room.

* * *

The first thing Caitlin comprehended was cold—a cold that seeped through her bones and made her quake.

Her eyes snapped open, and the source of the chill became evident as she felt the concrete floor at her back. She sat up quickly, too quickly, and winced at the pounding behind her eyes. For a moment she thought she might pass out again, but she shut her eyes and breathed deeply.

Once she had regained control of her consciousness, she looked up. Across the room, near the stairs, Cisco was staggering to his feet, clutching the back of his head. He saw Caitlin, jogged over, and helped her to her feet.

"It worked," Caitlin said. "We're back in reality." She paused, glancing around. "We are, right?"

"Definitely," Cisco said. "This feels different. It feels like reality." He scrunched up his face. "And my head hurts way worse here."

"We don't know how much time has passed," Caitlin said. "We need to find Dee before he hurts Barry."

"Cortex," Cisco said, nodding. "And grab the tranq gun. The totally real, physical one this time."

Caitlin followed him to the stairs, dipping down for the gun as she passed it. Together they vaulted up the stairs, Caitlin's heart pounding with each step. The place was quiet, disturbingly so.

Her hands tightened on the gun as they sprinted up the last few steps into the cortex. The lights of the space were still dimmed, but the ones of Barry's recovery room were flickering. When they went over to the room, though, they found that it was empty. The bedsheets were hanging off the bed, crumpled on the floor. Caitlin's throat clenched at the memory of her dream, of Barry bleeding through those white sheets, but Cisco snapped her out of it with, "Look—the wheelchair. It's gone."

He was right. The wheelchair, which she'd left by the bedside following their disastrous attempt to get Barry mobile, had disappeared. However, her worry didn't disappear as it should have, but increased exponentially.

"So Barry managed to get away," she said. "Where is he now?"

Cisco considered this a moment, then snapped his fingers and moved to the computer bank. "Security cameras. We can look through the feed to find out if he's still in the building."

Caitlin followed him to the computers and stood by, arms crossed, as he booted them up. While they warmed up, Caitlin glanced over at her phone which still sat on the table and saw it blinking with a voicemail. She tapped the screen.

"Barry," she said, immediately unlocking her phone and putting the voicemail on speaker. "T-twenty minutes ago."

" _Caitlin_." Barry's static-y, tinny voice filled the space. Even in a single word, there was unbridled panic, desperation, agitation. " _Dee's here—he's in the building. I don't know where you guys are, but…mmph…call me back. I'm going to…_ " A rustling of fabric, a barely-disguised whine of pain. Caitlin looked at Cisco nervously, and he reciprocated. On the computer screen, the STAR logo lit up, and Cisco navigated hastily to the security footage. " _I'm going to try and get out of here. Get yourself away from STAR. Stay safe_."

Rows of black and white images popped up on screen, most from once-occupied cells in the pipeline. Caitlin and Cisco skimmed over each box, searching for any signs of life. Most images were dead, still—so the one with movement drew them within seconds.

"God," Cisco said, pressing a knuckle to his mouth.

"Treadmill room." Caitlin was already halfway across the room in the direction of one of the other stairwells. She could hear Cisco's footsteps close behind her, but she felt as if she was running into a tunnel: vision, hearing, heartbeat, everything was growing distant, disconnected.

The image on the screen was the only thing that burned clearly: Dee, standing over Barry in the treadmill room, and Barry screaming.

* * *

Screaming, red lightning, blood. Fear, choking fear, fear that seeped out of his pores and poured out of his mouth in the form of shrieks.

The knife glinted, rose. Plunged into his mother's chest. An invisible knife simultaneously plunged into his own chest, and blood spilled onto the carpet.

His next yell was eaten up by a rush of reality that swept him back into the dim and cold and damp.

"Impressive, Flash," Dee said. "Very impressive. But you can't crawl back from the brink forever."

Barry blinked sluggishly, his eyelids heavier than they ever had been, cold sweat soaking the back of his t-shirt. He propped himself up on his elbows, the effort of raising himself unbelievable, while Dee remained unmoving a foot away. All at once, a new rush of weariness coursed through him like hot tar and plunged him back.

The singularity opened up around him, threatening to pull apart every atom of his body. Darkness pulsed around him, tearing light out of everything, claws of time and space leaving gashes in his reality. He kept running, stepping impossibly on flying chunks of the city. Voices thundered in his ear, and Ronnie burst into flames beside him, throwing everything into chaos.

Heat and claws and darkness, but the singularity remained open. The force of Firestorm's blast knocked him off course and he fell, through open air with nothing to hold on to, nothing to break his fall. As he fell, he saw the singularity envelop the sky, feasting on fiery pieces of the city, feasting on the shrieks of all of the innocents that fell upward, fell past him—he saw it all before he hit the ground, and—

"No," he jerked himself out of the dream. "It's not going to work."

Another surge, more powerful than ever, thrust Barry back.

Flashes of blue streaked across his vision, and Zoom's monstrous eyes stared him down. No words, just a slight tilt of the head. Barry looked to his chest and found a clawed hand buried there, wrist-deep. He opened his mouth wide, instinct prompting him to howl, but there was only blood, sticky blood filling his mouth, and he was choking, gagging…

Straight onto the polished floor of the room. The bile burned the back of his throat as he coughed violently. His arms now shook so badly he couldn't lift himself an inch from the floor, and he kept his forehead pressed into the coolness. When he realized that his eyes were closed, he forced them open blearily.

"I can tell you're tired, Mr. Allen," Dee's voice was distant, despite the fact that he was close enough to touch. "You haven't slept properly in days. Why not give in to it? Rest is important for the healing process."

"No," Barry said hoarsely. "You can't control me. You can't get in my head."

A burst of white fire behind his eyelids. The particle accelerator explosion, gusts of power so potent they rattled his bones.

"It's not real," Barry said, swinging onto his back with a grunt.

Iris' eyes blue like flame, her anger spilling toward him. Her mouth, soundless, forming the words, _I hate you_.

"Give in, Flash," Dee said as Barry scrambled for reality. "Go to sleep."

Barry tried a laugh between gasps of breath, feeling the solidity of the room more and more with each wheeze. "You're…losing…your touch."

He squeezed his eyes shut against an onslaught, but the images flashed by on a surface level, no longer stabbing at the deeper parts of his mind. Different kinds of lightning, red and white and yellow and blue, arced through the darkness of his subconscious, trying to slash through his defenses—but the defenses held.

His eyes flew open, and while the grogginess remained, there was a separation, like a rubber band being snapped in half. All at once part of his mind cleared, and the physical, artificial dread drained from his body.

"Breaking free of the dream.." Dee's voice was clinical, steeped in scientific curiosity, yet still laced with an undercurrent of rage. "How?"

"You can't show me anything new, and certainly nothing permanent," Barry wheezed. He looked up darkly. "You don't scare me. Trust me, nothing you can show me is worse than what I've already seen." He tried a smirk but fell miserably short. "You lose, Dee."

Dee considered this, frowning and stretching out the long cut down the side of his face. "Fascinating," he said. His expression changed, if only slightly, but Barry caught the shift too late. His brief moment of triumph was cut off by Dee striding forward and planting a foot on Barry's chest. Barry grasped futilely at the man's boot, trying to claw free, but it only pressed down harder.

"Fascinating, indeed: impressive mental resistance," the scientist said, grinding down his boot and buckling Barry's ribs. "It looks like we'll just have to try another method."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love that the number one comment I get on this story is "I hate you and your cliffhangers." I want to say I'm sorry, but I'm really not. I do it because I care.
> 
> Thanks for reading! You know the drill. See you Wednesday.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back!
> 
> First of all, I have to apologize for the delay. In a bout of coincidence so fitting even I couldn't invent it, I was struck on Tuesday by debilitating back pain from an old injury, so I've been out of commission since then. I was having trouble moving or doing anything remotely productive, which is why this is coming late. Things are defintely looking better today, so here we are! Art imitates life...or life imitates art.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for your patience. Without further ado (and with my newfound sense of apology for Barry), here's the penultimate chapter!

To say Cisco was panicking would be an understatement. He tried to convince himself as he ran down the stairs alongside Caitlin that this was going to be okay, that this was reality, that this was something that made sense. But, the truth was, the more those assurances ran through his head, the less comfort they gave—maybe reality made more sense than the dream world they had been trapped in, but it was also far more permanent.

And it wasn't lost on him that his dream had materialized before his very eyes up in the cortex: the image, exactly, of Barry's empty bed. As he ran down the stairs, heart thudding, he couldn't help but feel he was running too familiar paths.

At last they made it to the correct floor, and they both halted at the sight that awaited them.

"That's not good," Cisco said.

Understatement, he knew. At his feet was Barry's overturned wheelchair, bent and battered. The speedster's phone lay a few feet away, completely shattered, and, worse, his blood made ugly smears along the white linoleum.

"Wheelchairs and stairs—not a great mix." He tried a light tone, but he was fooling nobody.

"How did he get to the treadmill room?" Caitlin said.

Cisco's eye was still drawn to the blood—he had always hated the blood—and he gestured at it. From the obvious impact spot where the wheelchair lay, there was a trail of smeared red down the hall and around the corner.

Just as he gestured, though, a yell punctuated the space. He and Caitlin jerked forward instantly, abandoning the disturbing scene in favor of another one. More weapons might have been preferable, but they would have to settle for the single tranq gun. Cisco hoped it would be enough. If not, he was prepared to fight tooth and nail.

Literally—he wasn't above biting his opponents.

Just as they rounded the corner, they were thrust into another scene of horror, this one even more unexpected than the first. A fire extinguisher, dented as the wheelchair had been, lay next to a bloodied Iris. She was sprawled on the ground, hands secured above her head to a ring in the wall. Her face, creased in pain, turned toward them and crumpled.

"Barry's in there," she cried desperately. "Help him, please!"

A choked cry came from down the hall. Caitlin grabbed Cisco's sleeve. He stopped just long enough to place a hand on the shadowy restraints on Iris' wrists, concentrating hard as he had in the dream world. With a few seconds of concentration, the dream energy dissipated, and Iris' arms dropped to her lap.

"Go," she insisted. "I'm fine."

She wasn't, but Cisco knew better than to waste more time. He and Caitlin left her cradling her arm on the floor of the hallway.

They stumbled to a halt at the window to the treadmill room, and Cisco's stomach went sour. Inside, Barry lay prone, attempting to shield himself as Dee planted kick after kick. As Cisco watched, Dee picked up his friend by the throat and tossed him bodily backward onto the treadmill. Barry crashed loudly in a tangle of limbs and immediately started to army-crawl away, but Dee was upon him in a second, jamming a foot into Barry's back. Even behind the glass, Barry's yell was like a knife between Cisco's ribs.

Cisco bolted immediately for the door, but it was locked. He reached into his pocket for his keys and fumbled with them, ears filling with a rush of blood that couldn't quite drown out the chaos inside the room. He flipped through key after key, his fingers suddenly just useless hunks of flesh, but Caitlin had no such patience. Cisco's head jerked up at the sound of glass shattering from her putting the butt of the tranq gun through the window.

The explosion of glass drew Dee's attention to them. His sunken eyes narrowed.

Cisco had a split second to think _Maybe stealth would have been a better option_ before a veil of darkness was thrown over his eyes.

He was blinded by fire, the singularity, a burst of color and heat. At the sight, his heart was torn out of his chest. Of course, he was familiar with the literal sensation of a heart being crushed, but this was pretty damn close.

_Ronnie's dead, Ronnie`s dead, Ronnie's dead…_

He couldn't breathe; he was suffocating; his heart was going to rip itself to shreds.

Then he looked over and saw himself, Cisco Ramon, looking terrified.

He gasped his way back to the reality of the hallway, finding himself on the ground now and Caitlin grimacing a few feet away.

"Great, he can whammy us with other people's nightmares," Cisco wheezed. "He put me into your head."

"And mine in yours," Caitlin said. "I think I would have preferred not knowing the sensation of getting your heart crushed."

"Ditto." Cisco levered himself upward. "The pain—it feels real. That's not good."

"Can you fight him by vibing?"

"Worth a shot," Cisco said, because he heard Barry's yelp from in the room and knew Dee had resumed his physical threat.

Both of them stood again, rising up to the shattered window. Caitlin acted first, firing a shot from the tranq gun. The shot went far wide, and Dee paused just long enough to make Caitlin crumple again under the pressure of another dream. Cisco watched her thrash in pain before he was enveloped as well.

He heard it before he felt it: a cracking, like a dozen sticks snapping in half in unison. Then, pain so intense it erased every other sensation, pain in his spine, pain that ripped him from himself.

Zoom kneeled over him, a demon.

It was so intense that Cisco almost lost himself in Barry's experience—but it was Barry's experience, and Cisco gripped onto that and pushed back with all of his might.

Sweat poured down his neck in the real world. He was on the floor again, sore all over as if the attack had indeed been physical, but he heaved himself to the window again.

 _Snap_.

The fire of the broken spine hit him, but he fought it off fast enough that he remained standing, knuckles white on the windowsill. If he could break through Dee's barriers long enough, push inside Dee's head…

 _Snap. Snap. Snap_.

The spine broke over and over, pain on a loop, snatching oxygen and sanity and identity…

But he pushed, screaming, tapping into the sensation of the dream itself, and thrust it back at the source. Turned the tide, sent the wave crashing outward.

He knew it had worked as soon as he opened his eyes. Dee had stumbled backward a step on the treadmill, and Cisco knew, knew he had felt it.

Exhausted, Cisco braced himself for retaliation, but, at that moment, Barry reached up and slammed the main console of the treadmill.

The speedster had just enough time to roll to the floor before the cosmic treadmill revved up, whirring loudly and sending Dee sailing backward into the boxes of packing peanuts.

They had a moment of respite, of silence, as boxes settled and packing peanuts floated to earth. Dee was still in his corner, buried beneath cardboard, and the world felt momentarily suspended in jell-o.

Then Barry dropped his arm and whined, collapsing bodily on the edge of the treadmill. Cisco sprang into action again, helping Caitlin off of the floor and brushing broken glass from the window frame in preparation to vault over it. Though his entire body ached with pain and tiredness, he placed a foot on the chair, using it as leverage to clamber through the window.

And, just as his feet hit the floor, Dee exploded from beneath the boxes. The boxes went flying in all directions, one narrowly missing Cisco as it sailed outward. The explosion was followed by a similarly destructive blast of dark energy. While it had lost much of its potency given their combined efforts to counter it, the force of it was enough to strike Cisco in the chest and bring him thudding to the ground. He looked on with horror as Dee rose to his full height and stormed forward, a menace in shadows, sucking hope and triumph and joy out of the room, and he was unstoppable, an unstoppable dark tide of fear and suffering and pain and despair—

A resounding pop sounded just above Cisco's head, then another. Dee paused, dark energy suspended, and then dropped to the floor like a stone. Out of his chest sprouted two darts. Cisco craned his neck around to see Iris above him. She had the tranq gun propped on the windowsill, one arm cradled to her chest while the other supported the body of the gun. Seeing that both of her shots had fired true, she hauled the gun from the sill and lowered it, spitting, "Sweet dreams, bitch."

Cisco stared open-mouthed at the scene a few more seconds. Dee stayed down this time, knocked out cold. Cisco scrambled up to the door and unlocked it for Iris and Caitlin, remarking, "Remind me to tell you how badass that was."

As soon as he had the door unlocked, he jogged over to Barry, ignoring his own aches. He wasn't entirely sure where he could safely place a hand without further aggravating his friend's injuries, so he hovered close and said, "Dude, you okay?"

"Just peachy," Barry said with a huff. Half on and half off the treadmill, forehead pressed against the metal, he looked like he was a second away from throwing up or passing out or both.

"I'm sorry we didn't get here sooner," Cisco said, and, seeing Barry unmoving, obviously struggling to keep himself composed, he suddenly felt awkward, unprepared. "What do you need? How can I help?"

"I just need to stay still," Barry said. "My back."

Cisco grimaced in sympathy, his own spine twinging in phantom pain. Like with his dreams about the erased timeline, The pain Dee had inflicted was distant, almost intangible, but at the same time it had struck as clearly and acutely as any knife.

"No such luck," Caitlin said, striding into the room purposefully, if a bit wobbly on her feet. "We need to get you flat, and I need to get a look at what else he might have broken."

With all the speed and confidence of a real doctor, Caitlin pushed past the lost Cisco and very gently took Barry by the shoulders and eased him off of the treadmill to the floor. The bigger challenge was getting him to his back, which required both Cisco and Caitlin's efforts and a good deal of whining from Barry.

"I don't think anything's broken," he said between gasps. "Just some impressive bruising."

Cisco had to admit, the guy looked terrible. His nose still oozed dark blood, and more of it was smeared across his face, making everything look far worse than it likely was. Caitlin pulled up his STAR shirt to expose his ribs and stomach. He was right—like ugly flowers, bruises were beginning to blossom across his pale skin. However, Caitlin seemed satisfied with a preliminary prodding for broken bones.

The stab wound from Zoom, which had healed miraculously fast given the speed-dampening serum Barry had been injected with, had opened up slightly and was weeping blood, but it didn't look severe. Still, Caitlin's hands ghosted over the wound, trembling. Cisco remembered waking up in her dream, seeing the bloodstained sheets, and the lines on her face clicked in his head.

"I'll need to get a scan of your back," Caitlin said after her inspection. "I don't think he did any significant damage, but I want to make sure everything looks okay."

Barry's eyes had been squeezed shut for a while, but he nodded and mumbled indistinctly in response. Just as Cisco began to rise, Barry pried his eyelids open. "You guys okay?"

Cisco 's hand brushed Caitlin's arm. "Yeah," Caitlin said. "I think…I think we'll be okay."

A huge weight seemed to be lifted from Barry's shoulders. "Good. Guess he wasn't…so effective…with the nightmares…after all."

"No, I'd say not," Caitlin said, and Cisco saw her finger tighten around Barry's sleeve.

"I'll get Doctor Dee to his cozy little cell," Cisco said, finally standing. "I'll come up with a nickname later. Once I get some sleep. Doctor…Doctor…something."

He nodded at Iris, who had taken up sentry over the unconscious Dee with the tranq gun.

"Thanks," he said.

"Buy me an extra large cup of coffee and we're even," Iris said.

"Deal. One extra large cup of coffee." He stifled a yawn and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Actually, make that two."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more wrap-up chapter to go! And no cliffhanger! Must be a miracle.
> 
> Thank you as always for reading. As always, I appreciate your thoughts and comments below. See you Sunday.
> 
> Till next time,
> 
> Penn


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, folks, we're finally at the end. This chapter is short, sweet, and fluffy, but (I feel like) necessary wrap-up. Because these guys deserve a breath.
> 
> More notes at the end. For now, enjoy.

An hour later, Barry was back in his recovery room bed, clad in a fresh, non-bloodstained set of STAR comfort clothes. Even though he still felt confined, useless without his legs, he had to admit that the soft mattress and the pillow and the hot chocolate at his bedside table wasn't unwelcome after the events of the evening. After the initial agonizing struggle of transporting him back up from the basement to the cortex, the electric current of his spinal pain had subsided into a soft, glowing ember. Not great, but manageable.

The rest of the team was scattered throughout the cramped room. In the chair closest to Barry's bed, Cisco gazed off into empty space, eyes glazed, holding an ice pack to the back of his head. Across the room, Caitlin tended to Iris, who had made herself comfortable in a seat with her feet up on another chair. Barry tuned into their conversation fuzzily.

"Just a fracture," Caitlin was saying. "It's not bad, luckily. Still, you should probably take it easy for a few days."

"Not a problem," Iris said, patting her new sling. She then picked up Grodd's headgear from where she'd set it on a side table and inspected it. "What about this? Back down to storage?"

Cisco inhaled sharply and perked up. "Yeah, I suppose. I mean, how soon do you think we'll need giant-gorilla-and-sometimes-nightmare-repelling tech?" He looked around shiftily at all of them. "Uh…hopefully not for a long time, right? Did I just jinx something?"

"No, I'll put it back," Iris said, standing with evident effort and swinging the headgear on her good wrist. "I need to call my dad anyway." She made eye contact with Barry, and he tried to focus on her. "I'll tell him you're okay. You need anything else?"

Barry shook his head. "You were great today," he mumbled. "You saved my life."

"Maybe not saved you life, but postponed the possibility of your death."

"Don't tell Joe that."

Iris tried a smile. She understood, she knew. "Get some rest."

The door closed softly behind her. As soon as it did, Caitlin deposited the last of her supplies and collapsed into Barry's wheelchair, which was also close to his bed. She didn't look particularly chipper herself, sporting a nice bruise above her eye that was peeking out beneath her bangs.

"Another one in the books, huh?" she said, rubbing her neck.

"Definitely different," Barry said. "You guys, what, got trapped inside of a dream?"

Cisco nodded. "We only made it out because I'd done the whole lucid dreaming thing before. My vibe powers really come in handy. Caitlin packed the big punches, though. You should have seen the stuff she created."

Caitlin, though, shook her head. "I don't think I've ever been so terrified. It was like all my worst nightmares compounded into one." She rubbed idly at her forehead. "I can see how it might kill you."

"You think he realizes?" Barry said at once. "Do you think Dee realizes that it was him torturing his wife to death? With her nightmares?"

"Maybe not." Caitlin shifted. "Or maybe he does and he's pretending it's not real."

The image resurfaced from that night months ago, the chill of the hospital, the stranger in the bed thrashing and screaming. Dee's face had been so blank, it was hard to tell if he was menacing or terrified. Barry wrestled with the memory, tried to put it in the back of the mind, but he intrinsically knew that it was part of him now. Perhaps another thing to linger behind his eyelids.

"What did he make you guys see, anyway?" Barry asked, changing the subject quickly.

Caitlin and Cisco both averted their eyes, and Barry instantly dropped it. He knew as well as anybody how personal nightmares were, and how much they could hurt. Instead of pressing, he said, "Sorry you guys got caught in the crossfire. And that I wasn't there to help."

"No, we're sorry we weren't there to help you," Cisco said. "You're the one he was after. You're the one in a wheelchair. We should have been there to stop him."

"Enough with the blame," Caitlin said tiredly. "What matters is that we're all here, and in one piece, and…safe." The last word came out a tad unconvinced, hesitant, but she cleared her throat past it. "Speaking of which, how did you manage to fend off the nightmares, Barry? Why didn't they work on you?"

"Yeah," Cisco chimed in. "We got whammied with some of yours as well, and…um, painful."

Barry chewed on the inside of his cheek, considering his response. _He can't show me anything worse than what I've actually seen. Reality is currently more terrifying than nightmares. I already hurt too badly for him to get to me_. All of the responses seemed manufactured, squeaky-clean honest, and perhaps a bit too melodramatic.

He settled on a shrug. "You guys must've weakened him."

It wasn't a lie, but Cisco and Caitlin saw instantly that it wasn't the truth they'd wanted. However, they backed off without another word. There were a lot of things they all simply weren't willing to talk about, apparently.

It was familiar picture, the three of them sitting around in the recovery room; if not for all of the new aches and bruises and bandages it might have been as if the past hour hadn't happened. In the fall of adrenaline, the lingering depression was creeping back into Barry's blood. The TV remote still rested innocently on the table beside him, promising access to the outside world, to those news broadcasts and images and talking heads wondering, wondering what new reality was being created in the absence of the Flash.

"One thing's for sure," Cisco said, rubbing his eyes. "I don't think I'm ever gonna sleep ever again. Not after Dee went all Freddy Krueger in my head." He put his coffee to his lips and chugged it.

Caitlin nodded wearily in agreement, but Barry settled back into the pillows and sank into his exhaustion. Monitors beeped beside him, a stillness draped over him, and the tingling in his legs was muffled by the fresh—but brief—batch of pain killers Caitlin had provided him with. Caitlin's word, colored by hesitancy, echoed in his ears: _Safe_.

Not really, not in the long run, not with his future uncertain and Zoom still on the loose. But maybe for a moment. If they were lucky.

"Actually," he said, letting the tiredness sweep his eyes closed. "I think I'm ready to sleep for a very long time."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woo! That's a wrap.
> 
> It always feels weird ending long stories like this one, because I feel like it all passes in the blink of an eye, and I'm never sure what to say when it's all over. Mostly, I don't know how to express the level of gratitude I have for you all taking the time to read and engage! One of the great parts of fanfiction is the chance to interact with people who love the same things you do, and who are genuinely interested in the things you are creating. This story, especially, has had such an outstanding response, so I cannot thank you enough for that.
> 
> As for what's coming next, be on the lookout in the next week or so for a new (shorter) fic, and potentially some one-shots. My semester is wrapping up and things are busy, but I want to make time for writing as well. If you want, you can check me out on tumblr at pennflinn, where I also take prompts for Flash flashfic (which is incredibly fun to say five times fast).
> 
> In short, thanks for a great run, truly. I so appreciate you all!
> 
> Penn
> 
> PS: I mentioned early on that this was inspired by a Justice League episode. If you're interested, it's actually a two-parter, episodes 2x05 and 2x06, "Only a Dream." Check it out!


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